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.