Dear Beatriz,
Moving across the country is a great trial, especially to one who loves books. I recently passed through such an ordeal myself, having spent the better part of last September and October packing up my apartment in sunny Los Angeles for a move to southern Minnesota, where I am now back in my hometown, freezing, and accompanied by many more books than I left with 20 years ago.
How many books? I cannot give you an exact number. It would be easier to estimate their weight. While I probably should have been canceling my electric and gas accounts, changing my mailing address, and throwing out novelty beer steins, I was instead sitting in front of my book shelves, agonizing over which titles to save and which to throw away. I eventually culled the herd, but not by much. Consequently, instead of basking in the Mediterranean climate, I spent my final days in our fair city packing my car with 40-pound boxes, ferrying them to the post office on Pico Boulevard and Westmoreland, and shipping them media rate to my new address. There were 12 boxes of books. That’s nearly 500 pounds.
A reasonable man would have taken fewer, but like Petrarch I must confess that “lest you consider me immune to all the sins of men, there is one implacable passion that holds me which so far I have been neither able nor willing to check … Do you wish to hear the nature of this disease? I am unable to satisfy my thirst for books.”[1]
While staring at my shelves for hours, or trying not to throw out my back at the post office, I had occasion to wonder about the etiology of my bibliomania and its purpose in my life.
First, I had to decide which books I could safely throw away. These were the ones I decided I would never open again. Mostly fiction, as it turned out. Farewell Michael Chabon! Farewell Edith Wharton! We hardly knew ye.
History and other kinds of informational nonfiction I almost always saved, if only because I might eventually need them for a reference or an anecdote. It seemed foolish to throw out something that might be of practical use later. Perhaps it seems unlikely to you that I will one day need to scour the pages of Brian Tierney’s The Crisis of Church and State, 1050-1300 for an example of a Pope behaving badly, but I might, Beatriz, I really might.
Then came the instructive part. As I am house-sitting for the next several months, most of my personal library will sit in a storage facility on the edge of town. For at least six (6) months I will have just one (1) box of books on hand. That’s only about 20 volumes. But which titles would go in this special box?
At first, I vacillated. One day I would put a book in the box. The next day I would pull it out. The next day I would put it back in and resolve that it would stay there this time. The next day I removed it again and made a similar resolution to keep it out—which promise I broke the very next day. And so on. After several weeks of this, I finalized the box. Then I looked at the titles again to see if I could detect a common watermark running through them all.
As it turned out, I generally had not picked Matthew Arnold’s “the best of what has been thought and said.” Neither my Moby Dick nor my Milton made the cut. This is partly because it’s easy enough to find a copy of Moby Dick anywhere (sure enough, the house I’m in now has a lovely illustrated edition), but there was another reason, too. I simply don’t open Melville or Milton that often. On further reflection, I realized that I had been unconsciously guided by a single criterion: Which of these books did I regularly pick up and reacquaint myself with, as if I were calling an old friend?
This analogy between books and friends is longstanding, of course. Petrarch was here long before me: “Gold, silver, precious stones, beautiful clothing, marbled homes, cultivated fields, painted canvases, decorated horses, and other similar things, possess silent pleasure. Books please inwardly; they speak with us, advise us and join us together with a certain living and penetrating intimacy.”
What is the nature of this intimacy? It is a little peculiar. Books are, after all, inanimate objects, so the friendship is pretty one-sided. Love them as we may, we will never get them to pick us up from the airport. Yet Petrarch seems quite right to me. Like friends, our favorite books are a joy to spend time with, whether they are telling us stories, arguing a point, or offering advice. At times, they seem to know us better than we know ourselves, not only informing us on this or that subject but also truly informing us, shaping our characters and views on life. This is in line with the classical ideal of friendship, in which friends are not just those we find pleasant or useful, but those whose virtues we admire and would make our own. As with the acquisition of any virtue, this takes time. I return again and again to certain authors in the hope that through long intimacy I will one day absorb a little bit of their characteristic manners of speaking and thinking.
Of course, as with human friends, not every book is right for every occasion. I will always treasure your description of a mutual friend as “a strong flavor,” as if she, like cumin, would not be welcome at every dinner table. The same is true of books, even the ones we love best. When I look at the ones I made sure to keep with me—arrayed before me now as I write—I find that they are best suited to different tempers and occasions. Do I want to luxuriate in a misanthropic mood? Philip Larkin. Do I feel erudite and wish to take a sweeping survey of western religion and philosophy? Leszek Kowlakowski. Am I feeling low and in need of a reminder that human beings have untold capacity for kindness and creativity? David Graeber. Do I want to hear the whole organ of human feeling, from the lowest note to the highest, though never louder than a mezzo forte? George Herbert. Depending on what I pull off the shelf, I can find good humor (Tom Sharpe), bad manners (Roberto Bolaño), exuberant flights of fancy (Wallace Stevens), deflationary judgments (Joan Didion), jaundiced cynicism (John Gray), consolation (Simone Weil), or encouragement (Marilynne Robinson).
I must also admit that my favorite authors, like any of my friends (yourself excepted, of course), also have their flaws. There they go again. John Gray is once again grudgingly admitting that okay maybe there has been some moral progress in human history if you count the abolition of slavery in the industrialized west but OTHERWISE… while Marilynne Robinson will not stop implying that the Puritan magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were as liberal as you or me. As with any of my friends, their foibles are dear to me as their virtues and quite inseparable from each other.
This all explains one of my personal peculiarities. In the pop psychological parlance of our times, I am an extravert. At the same time, there is still almost nothing I would rather do than pick up a book and disappear.
Here’s how it fits together. I like people and I like parties and I once disturbed my wife when we took the Rorschach Test together and I compulsively found human faces in every shape—faces she could not see. I have been this sociable since before I can remember. To hear my parents tell it, I was a child who refused to be left alone for more than a minute, demanding one energetic game after another until they were completely exhausted. Sedate, independent play was not for me. But there was one way they could calm me down: books. I would sit perfectly still for however long they were willing to read to me. My poor mother only stopped when she started to lose her voice. After I learned to read I remained enthralled, sitting silent and still for hours at a time on the couch while I travelled to distant fantasy kingdoms or faraway planets. This is still the case. Perhaps the happiest season of my life, Beatriz, was my 30th summer, when I spent a few glorious months at a lake cabin without visible company but with three grocery bags full of books for my big grad school exam on the History of Christian Ethics. Who could be bored, or lonely, when John Chrysostom was extolling the virtues of marriage but then stopped to complain that “even donkeys behave better than some people at wedding parties”? For me reading has never been a solitary pursuit. It is a chance not just to get to know something, but to keep company with someone.
An essayist I admire has also written about having too many books, admitting that he once thought “they would somehow redeem” him. But now, having seen through “the false advertising by which mere learning is said to lead to happiness,” he was ready to throw most of them out—and did. Perish the thought. I don’t expect my books to redeem me, Beatriz, yet I can’t bear to part from them, either. They are less my saviors than my friends. They have brought me happiness, and my life would be so much poorer without them.
As it will be without you! And without all my other friends in Los Angeles. It is hard not to know when we and our spouses will have another dinner party, or if we will ever watch our children chase each other around a sunny rose garden again. It was just the same when I left behind friends in New Haven, New York City, and Charlottesville. I miss them all, and our habitual ways of being together. I also have books dating from each of these periods. In fact, I think one of the reasons I hold on to my favorite authors so tenaciously is that they are the friends I can take with me.
But though I always keep my old friends, new opportunities arise too. The house I have inhabited, taking it over like a lucky hermit crab, belongs to a retired English professor. The walls are lined with books. There are more authors here than I could reasonably read, although I have already made the acquaintance of Saul Bellow, Adrienne Rich, and Primo Levi, while James Thurber, Alice Munro, and Sylvia Plath await.
Who knows who I’ll befriend next?
Words from a few of my friends:
It was Sir Cathcart’s birthday and as usual there was a party at Croft Castle. … In the interests of several Royal guests and uninhibited debauchery, masks were worn if little else. Sir Cathcart typically adopted the disguise of a horse, its muzzle suitably foreshortened to facilitate conversation and his penchant for fellatio.
- Tom Sharpe, Porterhouse Blue
- The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos.
- That would be a hell of a zoo.
- The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so.
- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
- Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
My old loves held me back. They tugged at the garment of my flesh and whispered: “Are you getting rid of us?” And “from this moment we shall never be with you again, not for ever and ever.”
- Augustine, Confessions
Today silly old men and crazy old ladies are so prevalent that I need not refer to worthless and absurd young people.
- Petrarch, Familiar Letters
Yes, man is mortal, but that isn’t so bad. What’s bad is that sometimes he’s unexpectedly mortal, that’s the rub! And, in general, he can’t say in the morning what he’ll be doing that very same night.
- Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
That night, he could not sleep, his throat was tight, he was thirsty; he got up to drink from his water jug, and he opened the window; the sky was covered with stars, a warm wind was passing, in the distance, dogs were barking. He turned his face toward Les Bertaux.
- Gustave Flaubert, Madam Bovary, the moment Charles realizes he’s in love with Emma
Humankind is not a collective agent that can decide its destiny. If humans are different from other animals it is chiefly in being governed by myths, which are not creations of the will but creatures of the imagination.
- John Gray, Gray’s Anatomy
To walk in the direction of one’s dream is necessarily to risk the dream.
- Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: the Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage
Nobody can promise that he will never be mistaken; but it is possible to preserve the spirit of truth, which means never to abandon a vigilant mistrust of one’s own words and identifications, to know how to retract one’s errors, to be capable of self-correction. That is humanly possible, and one should expect it from intellectuals.
- Leszek Kowlakowski, “The Intellectuals,” Modernity on Endless Trial
His passage through literature left a trail of blood and several questions posed by a mute. It also left one or two silent replies.
- Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas
They [high-level academic administrators] will be chosen on the same general grounds of fitness as their chief—administrative facility, plausibility, proficiency as public speakers and parliamentarians, ready versatility of convictions, and a staunch loyalty to their own bread.
- Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on Conduct of Universities by Businessmen (originally subtitled: “A Study in Depravity”)
In our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to get paid for it.
- David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs
If we are to consider the heavens, how much more are we to consider the magnificent energies of consciousness that make whomever we pass on the street a far grander marvel than our galaxy?
- Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, remark 129
I cannot with that great Father securely interpret the worke of the first day, Fiat lux, to the creation of Angels, though (I confesse) there is not any creature that hath so neare a glympse of their nature, as light in the Sunne and Elements; we stile it a bare accident, but where it subsists alone, ‘tis a spirtuall Substance, and may bee an Angel: in briefe, conceive light invisible, and that is a Spirit.
- Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici
Can there be any day but this,
Though many sunnes to shine endeavor?
We could three hundred but we misse;
There is but one, and that one ever.
- George Herbert, “Easter”
It was not important that [Ariel’s poems] survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.
- Wallace Stevens, “The Planet on the Table”
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.
- Joan Didion, Where I Was From
Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.
- Philip Larkin, “A Study of Reading Habits”
[1] Familiar Letters. Book III, letter 18.