Borges, St. Catherine, and the Dewey Decimal System

“I have always imagined heaven to be a kind of library.” –Jorge Luis Borges

I have always agreed with Borges, in part I suppose because I have always experienced libraries to be a kind of heaven. Think of it: comfort, companionship, solitude, knowledge; worlds at my fingertips, sunlight over my shoulder, a pillow at my back and, if possible, a footrest. So many minds present around me, like beneficent ancestors, or stone saints eager to jump down from their perches to murmur blessings or answers into the air.

In the paradisiacal library, there would be a lot more white marble, of course, and the bookshelves could rise for miles, since our wings would make pointless those nifty ladders on wheels, and our CPS (Celestial Positioning System) would lead us unerringly to the text we desired every time.

Certainly, Borges and I are not the only book lovers to have such thoughts. As Adrian Joline writes, “I fear that in the world of the hereafter there may be no books, but it is not easy for me to imagine a heaven where books are not. I do not mean to be irreverent and I do not know whether I may attain even a bookless heaven, but I am unorthodox enough to own that I might prefer a bookish Hades” (44).

But if we are to believe St. Catherine of Sienna, a Doctor of the Church, there may not be that much to worry about. As she says, “All the way to heaven is heaven” (qtd. in Gallagher ix).


Gallagher, Winifred. Working on God. New York: Random House, 1999.
Joline, Adrian. At the Library Table. Boston: Gorham P, 1910.

Enemies of Books, Part 1

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” –Shakespeare, Hamlet

Everyone has lost at least one good book to the careless borrower. My mother is still waiting for a neighbor to return her copy of No Idle Hands: A Social History of Knitting. My battered paperback copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art is probably in Singapore (no, really, it is). And I only recently found for my father a replacement copy of Floating Palaces: New London to New York on the Old Fall River Line.

So when it comes to the enemies of books, the first to consider is people and you need to decide one basic thing: shall I lend my books or not? After that, if the answer is yes, or even sometimes, then you need first to get bookplates and then to create criteria for lending. Bookplates are a topic too large for this entry, so I'll look at criteria now instead.

First, to whom shall I lend? In general, I have learned not to lend to anyone whose home address I don’t know. Also, I will not lend to anyone whom I fear may lend my book on to a third person. This is how I lost my L’Engle. It started innocently enough when I lent it to a friend who sang in our church choir. When she finished it, though, another mutual choir friend asked to borrow it and, before I knew it, it had made the rounds of the whole choir, ending in the possession of one Corinne, who finished her bachelor’s degree at Berklee College of Music and returned to her native Singapore to begin her singing career. In retrospect, I don’t really regret that she should now have L’Engle’s reflections on faith and art, since she may well need them, after all. But still: Singapore.

Lesson learned.

Second, what shall I lend, or better yet, what shall I not lend? Losing the L’Engle book, which I had annotated and underlined, taught me never to lend a book I have annotated, since I only annotate the books I know I will go back to. In A.L. Humphrey’s wonderful 1897 book The Private Library, he looks at this rule from a slightly different (Victorian?) angle, saying: “If you are in the habit of lending books, do not mark them. These two habits together constitute an act of indiscretion” (24). This does make sense. Marginalia often comes from the heart. How much do you want to reveal, and to whom? (I may have to write more about this later, including the potential joys in buying an annotated second-hand book, which can be quite amusing, though of course, the annotater is forever unknown and safe from my knowledge of his or her “indiscretion.”)

Third, given that L’Engle’s book was out of print, and it took me about seven years to find another copy, I have learned not to lend books that are out of print, over 70 years old, in fragile condition, or in some other way one of a kind, irreplaceable.

Fourth, there are some books that want and need to be lent For the Good of Humankind and the Planet. Precisely which books these are depends on the person. I find I keep “lendiving” Richard Bach’s Illusions and Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris. My roommate can’t seem to keep a single copy of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. You have your Planetary Books, too. You know you do.*

In that case, I recommend, along with Mr. Humphreys, “It is better to give a book than to lend it” (24).


Humphreys, A.L. The Private Library. New York: J.W. Bouton, 1897.

*Tell me what they are and I'll do an entry just on Planetary Books.

Curiously Connected

Recently, I downloaded a pdf file of Luther Farnham’s A Glance at Private Libraries from 1855, which he describes in the Prefatory Note as “an article on private libraries…chiefly of Boston and neighborhood.” This 80-page “article” quite literally goes through the libraries owned by local worthies—writers, statesmen, pastors, doctors—and describes the number of each owner’s books, his chief collections, any particularly notable editions, and, in some cases, the architecture and decoration of the library, particularly when the library also served as the study of the man in question.

For example, Farnham says that the library “of Mr. Edward Everett, though not half as large as some others in the country, is one of the most perfect in its arrangement and most useful for a general scholar” (11). After four pages of book descriptions, he mentions that “A few articles of curiosity are distributed about the library and adjoining rooms. Among these may be mentioned implements and weapons of the native tribes of this continent, and of the islands of the Pacific; an ancient halberd from the Tower of London; specimens of the stamped paper prepared under the stamp act in 1765; balls from some of the principle battle fields in Europe and America; an ear of corn from an ancient Peruvian tomb; […] a small lock of the hair of Napoleon I., and so forth” (15-16).

Now, the 19th century curio was a bit different from the 21st century conversation piece, just as the home library was more than just a place for the family’s books. “[T]he home library, as it developed in the Victorian era, […] housed collections of plant and animal specimens, travel souvenirs, art prints, and pictures and busts of historical figures, in addition to books. The library was the room in the house where children were encouraged to look at books and be read to, to study the collections and look at the pictures. It functioned in a similar way for adults, and […] was a signal to visitors that this household valued intellectual curiosity” (Volz 35). Through such curiosities, “families presented themselves as participants in the worlds of literature and scientific learning” (Grier 58). When I look around where my own books live, I find that most of the symbolic ornamentation on my desk and bookcases are travel souvenirs. Few are true curios.

Here’s the bronze dragon I bought in Hong Kong, and a small statue of Guan Gung, the Chinese god of war and literature. There are the two bud vases from Tobe, Japan and the maple tea-tray from Miyajima. About the only real educational oddity is the armillary sphere on my desk. It is a model of the earth, surrounded by a series of metal bands, some fixed and others moveable, which was used by the Greeks to show the movement of the sun and stars in relation to earth. I didn’t buy it because I wanted to predict star locations. Rather, a few times when I’ve been meditating I have experienced the sensation of being a part of the cosmos, both a center point through which all orbits pass and a vibrating, whirling orb passing through the center of everything. The armillary sphere reminds me of those moments.

Perhaps this helps explain Mr. Everett and all of us who gather relics from our travels, external or internal, and keep them near our books. We want, by thinking, by reading, and by remembering, to recall our connectedness to everything.


Farnham, Luther. A Glance at Private Libraries. Boston: P of Crocker and Brewster, 1855.
Foy, Jessica H. and Thomas J. Schlereth, ed. American Home Life, 1880-1930. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1992.
Grier, Katherine C. “Decline of the Memory Palace: The Parlor after 1890.” Foy and Schlereth. 49-74.
Volz, Candace. “Modern Look of Early Twentieth-Century Homes.” Foy and Schlereth. 25-48.

The Consolation of Reading

Having recently decided to return to school next year to get a degree in theology, I mentioned to a friend my nervousness at the thought of becoming a student again in my forties. She listened patiently, and then led my attention back to something I’d said earlier: I’d described how, halfway through watching Schindler’s List, I’d felt the need for background material to understand it more thoroughly; I’d been reading about German history, the psychology of good and evil, and liberation theology ever since.

“You’ll be fine,” she said. “You treat your life as if it were a graduate seminar. School will be easy in comparison.”

She’s quite likely right. I forget that most people don’t live the way I do (possibly excepting my father). I read the way most people eat—regularly, for nourishment and enjoyment, and because how else could I live?

But in fact it turns out that I am not so alone as all that. Last Saturday in a fit of Book Karma, I found myself compelled to go to a particular used bookstore in downtown Boston and I left with a 1906 book of essays called From a College Window by Arthur C. Benson, “Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge.” A century ago, he was a bit older than I am now, and had been teaching for about as long as I have.

In the third essay, “Books,” he enumerates three motives for reading: pleasurable, intellectual, and ethical (Benson 53). The first two seem self-explanatory to me, and the paragraphs about them are of interest less for their content than their lovely, old-fashioned style, e.g.: “Such a [well-read] man, if he steers clear of the contempt for indefinite views which is often the curse of men with clear and definite minds, makes the best kind of talker, stimulating and suggestive; his talk seems to open doors into gardens and corridors of the house of thought; and others, whose knowledge is fragmentary, would like to be at home, too, in that pleasant palace” (56).

His description of the third motive, however, caught my attention because it seemed to tell me something about what I do and who I am. Benson says, “and then we come to what I have called for want of a better word, the ethical motive for reading. […] I do not know why so much that is hard and painful and sad is interwoven with our life here; but I see, or seem to see, that it is meant to be so interwoven. All the best and most beautiful flowers of character and thought seem to me to spring up in the track of suffering; and what is the most sorrowful of all mysteries, the mystery of death, the ceasing to be […] becomes more solemn and awe-inspiring the nearer we advance to it” (58-60).

Now, he’s not done yet, but I note here my suspicion that few of my colleagues and none of my college students would connect the necessity for reading with the inevitability of death. Yet I can’t help thinking that Benson is onto something here. He continues, “I do not mean that we are to go and search for unhappiness; but, on the other hand, the only happiness worth seeking for is a happiness which takes all these dark things into account, looks them in the face, reads the secret of their dim eyes and set lips, dwells with them, and learns to be tranquil in their presence” (60; italics mine).

Here I recognize my search, via books, for an understanding of God and of how ordinary men and women can become killers or saviors: for a happiness that takes the darkness into account. As he says, “In this mood—and it is a mood which no thoughtful man can hope or ought to wish to escape—reading becomes less and less a searching for instructive and impressive facts, and more and more a quest after wisdom and truth and emotion” (60). To some extent this mood is a desire for restoration of a belief we may have had as children that somehow it all makes sense, a belief that books are particularly suitable to convey, as they are chaos-into-cosmos between covers.

“And thus in such a mood reading becomes a patient tracing out of human emotion, human feeling, when confronted with the sorrows, the hopes, the motives, the suffering which beckon us and threaten us on every side. One desires to know what pure and wise and high-hearted natures have made of the problem; […] one desires to share the thoughts and hopes, the dreams and visions, in the strength of which the human spirit has risen superior to suffering and death” (61-62).

And so I read. I ask questions and search through books not so much for answers as for other voices also addressing these questions. What is the nature of evil? How do we become capable of mindlessly cooperating in corrupt systems that harm others? What is the nature of goodness? How can we choose, day by day, to resist corruption, to build a sustainable, equitable future for the planet and all its inhabitants? How can I look at the vastness of the problems and still refuse to despair?

I read. Benson speaks from England a century ago, but his deep, dry voice seems to come from close by, perhaps from the chair next to mine in the library: “[T]he reading that is done in such a mood […] is a desire to feed and console the spirit” (62).


Benson, Arthur C. From a College Window. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906.

Declaring an Interest

I recently came across a slim red book, marked $3 and titled The Enjoyment of Wine. I immediately thought, “Well, I love wine, but I love books more,” but I picked it up, and reading the chapter titles led me to buy it, simply so that I might use its author’s ideas to say things I have long wanted to say about books. To use H.W. Yoxall’s sentences shamelessly, “I have been [reading books] now for [thirty-five] years, regularly, appreciatively and with attention. I wonder how much I have [read] in all. Probably not as much as I think” (13).

If I have read more books than some other people have, I put it down to influences familial and academic rather than societal. My parents have two walls of bookcases completely filled floor to ceiling with books, and several parts of other walls similarly crammed. In our family’s case it was not so much that “books do decorate a room” as “books do furnish a life.” Having thankfully grown up before the MTV generation, I have always associated books with Knowledge—facts and ideas to keep in the treasury in the back of my mind for future need—rather than, at best, Information—facts for practical use now and immediate erasure from memory. For two years, my mother brought home with the groceries the monthly volume of Encyclopedia Britannica Junior for me, and I read them, soaking up the pages on aardvarks and Australia, gems and Greek gods, knights, naval uniforms, and Vikings. I never intended to use this material; at ten or eleven years old, it was purpose enough simply to absorb it, to know it for its own sake, and to slide each red and gold volume onto my gradually filling shelves.

In college, as an English major, and later in graduate school, I read yet more books: Austen, Dickens, Shakespeare and Woolf in the 1980s; Maxine Hong Kingston, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison and Tim O’Brien in the 1990s. Then with my MFA in hand, I went and—tremble, gentle reader—began to teach English.

For fifteen years, I have taught at several colleges in Boston: freshman composition; creative writing of fiction, poetry and autobiography; as well as American literature in various forms. But otherwise I went on with my life as usual, which largely meant reading what I wanted to: medieval history, mystery novels, architecture, business, flamenco and martial arts. So although I know how to analyze and explicate a text, I do not offer these blog entries as professional opinions, but as personal meditations.

I have long thought that any kind of writing could be a love poem, if it described with enough acute attention the perceived beauty of its subject. Some years ago, I discovered a similar sentiment expressed by the poet May Sarton. As a character says in her 1965 novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, “When I said that all poem are love poems, I meant that the motor power, the electric current is love of one kind or another. The subject may be something quite impersonal—a bird on a windowsill, a cloud in the sky, don’t you know?” (125).

I love books because I find in them new friends, old selves, comforting ideas and epiphanies. These entries, then, are offered as love poems. Read them as such, as you might read a sonnet written one or five hundred years ago for some other soul, and think with affection of your own beloved.

Sarton, May. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. New York: W.W. Norton, 1965.
Yoxall, H.W. The Enjoyment of Wine. New York: Drake, 1972.