Home Library Corner

What's On My Bookshelf? And Why?

2008-07-31T19:37:00.001-07:00

For two years now, I have been a member of LibraryThing.com, a website where you can catalogue your whole library: what joy! As of today, in the wake of some unexpected book-buying, I have catalogued 713 volumes. That doesn’t include dictionaries, cookbooks, Calvin & Hobbes, and the like, but it does include most of my library. The serious books--the history, theology, fiction, poetry, essays, and especially the books on books--are all in there. One of the nice things about LibraryThing is that you know you are in the presence (virtual anyway) of people who understand your weakness. Among the hundreds of online groups you can join is one named Bookshelves: If You Build/Buy Them, They Will Fill.

Oh my, yes. Fill they will.

I live in a small apartment, so probably buying five books today wasn’t my most prudent idea. But prudence is not necessarily a key aspect of a bibliophile’s character. As the minister Henry Ward Beecher writes, “Alas! Where is human nature so weak as in a book-store! Speak of the appetite for drink; or of a bon-vivant’s relish for dinner! What are these mere animal throes and ragings compared with those fantasies of taste, of those yearnings of the imagination, of those insatiable appetites of intellect, which bewilder a student in a great bookseller’s temptation-hall?” (250).

Amen. Preach it, brother!

I already have stacks of books crowding in front of the books that are standing neatly together on the shelves. As Adrian Joline says, dear old friends of books “sometimes [lament] because the shelves are not exactly adapted to the association of fellow-books so that we fear that they will not be as friendly one to another as would like to have them…. what more agreeable work may he find than that of assorting the books, so that… their skyline be less jagged than that of lower New York…” (43). Unfortunately, my shelves resemble New York less than they do, say, New Delhi.

Sigh. More later.

Beecher, Henry Ward. “Bookstores, Books.” Star Papers. New York: J. C. Derby, 1855.
Joline, Adrian H. At the Library Table. Boston: Gorham Press, 1910.

The Gentleman Scholar, Part 2

2008-03-03T17:37:00.000-08:00

I recently bought a copy of Carl Spizweg’s 1850 painting “The Book-Worm” for my apartment. The more I look at the oblivious old man standing on the ladder with books under his arms and between his knees, fondly reading yet another text in his hands, the more I recognize that my Inner Child and my Inner Warrior Princess have some company deep in the archetypal cavernous library of my mind. Still, I’d like to find a good archetype for a female scholar and/or bibliophile that might more accurately portray what I and so many of my friends recognize about ourselves.

One problem typical in women’s history is that the reality of women’s lives often far outpaces the (usually) male portrayal of them, particularly in books. Not quite two centuries ago, Jane Austen brought attention to this problem in her novel, Persuasion. The protagonist, Anne Elliot is having a heated discussion with her friend Captain Harville, about love and the comparative constancy of men and women. Harville says:

[W]e shall never agree I suppose upon this point. No man and woman would, probably. But let me observe that all histories are against you, all stories, prose and verse…. I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men. (Austen 220)

And Anne replies: “Perhaps I shall.—Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands” (221). Education and literacy must perforce precede bibliophilia; a book can only serve as a conversation partner if a person can understand the language it speaks. And for centuries education was limited. During the middle ages, only the clergy were literate. When all texts were copied out by hand, the ability to read was far from a necessity, even for lords: that’s why they had clerks and scribes, who were usually priests. However, literacy could come in handy in other ways. “Benefit of clergy” meant that anyone arrested for a crime, who could prove he could read (and it was usually a man), could be tried by an ecclesiastical court rather than a civil court. When the difference in punishment for a serious crime could be, say, a pilgrimage rather than hanging, the benefit is obvious. (After all, pilgrims might actually return home alive.) This morsel of history helps explain both the connection of maleness with scholarship and, less directly, the deeply embedded misogyny of bibliophiles up until our own century.

The source of that less direct reason is Richard de Bury’s book Philobiblon. Richard, served as Cofferer to the King, Treasurer of the Wardrobe, and Clerk of the Privy Seal for King Edward III of England in the fourteenth century, and became Bishop of Durham in 1334. He traveled often on political business for the king and used his exhausting journeys in Europe as opportunities to collect books. But of course, he had been trained as a priest in a time when people were still busy blaming Eve for the sin of Adam and everybody else. So it’s no surprise to see, in Chapter IV, when he describes, “woman, to wit, whose cohabitation was formerly shunned by the clergy, from whom we have ever taught our pupils to fly, more than from the asp and the basilisk;...this beast, ever jealous of our studies, and at all times implacable” (34).

To find women role models for scholarship and bibliophilia then, it would seem that we are going to have to look closer in time to the (enlightened?) present.

Austen, Jane. Persuasion. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.
de Bury, Richard. Philobiblon. Trans. John Bellingham Inglis. New York: Meyers, 1899.

The Gentleman Scholar and Other Archetypes, Part 1

2008-01-26T17:59:00.000-08:00

I’ve been looking around my apartment lately, at the furniture, at the books, and at my as-yet unrealized internal vision of the book furniture (oh, come on, tell me that you don’t envision bookcases all along your longest wall!). And I’ve come to the strange realization that I apparently have an internal self-image mirroring the British Gentleman Scholar. Now, this would be okay, I suppose, if, in fact, I were British and/or belonging to the upper class and/or male.

I’m not.

I realize that this is, potentially, a problem. Here I am: an American (liberal), middle class (and more bourgeois than I like to admit), female (feminist), well-traveled-antiquarian-English-professor-type. My deepest instinct tells me that the breadth of my experience, the width of my mind, the rigor of my training and the shear pain of my having spent the last fifteen (15) years trying to teach college students (who are, every year, worse at basic spelling) how to write, argue, and think critically—surely all this is much more important than extraneous identifiers such as nationality, class, or sex. Surely.

I guess it would depend on whom you ask and when you asked them. Andrew Lang, in his otherwise lovely little book The Library, says,

Almost all women are the inveterate foes, not of novels, of course, nor peerages and popular volumes of history, but of books worthy of the name. …[B]roadly speaking, women detest the books which the collector desires and admires. First, they don’t understand them; second, they are jealous of their mysterious charms; third, books cost money; and it really is a hard thing for a lady to see money expended on what seems a dingy old binding, or yellow paper scored with crabbed characters. (61)

Naturally, Lang does not spend any time considering that the very education that men got in his time (and women didn’t) might offer the key to the differing views of the value the two sexes placed upon money and its use, or books and their use or lack of use. We all can only speak from our worldviews. Lang (1844-1912) could not help being a man of his time. A Victorian like Lang naturally could not imagine that, within less than a century of his book’s publication in 1881, an entire rethinking of the relations between the sexes might occur.

Sometimes, when I am feeling optimistic in the extreme, I wonder what utopian wonders the next fifty or hundred years might bring. Might women start earning 90 cents to a man’s dollar, as opposed to the 76 cents we earn now? Might more marriages turn out like my brother’s? I was practically in the ether back in late June when I watched him starting to cook dinner while his wife sat tensely watching the opening of a Red Sox game. Dinner was quite good. The ballgame, while not great per se, taught me a lot about baseball and marriage in the 21st century: my brother tried (manfully?) to explain the offside rule (or something like that) while his wife kindly corrected his minor errors. I wanted to dance. The ballgame was—well, it was 21st century Red Sox, which is to say they actually had a chance of winning; whether they did or not I don’t recall. Eighty-six years of not winning the World Series has become trivial since they finally won again. Now that they have won twice, the whole thing is, as they say, “academic,” which tends to mean unimportant except in terms of statistical analysis.

And this brings me back to the idea of the scholar. When people talk about scholars, the topic of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake” frequently comes up. Now this topic could go two ways, although it rarely does. Usually, what people mean when they use this phrase is that somebody (probably a white male of the upper classes) is getting paid good money to think about thinking about thinking, which seems to the speakers like a waste of good money on someone who probably already has good money and can’t be bothered to do a real job. (Whereas I myself would only use this definition for “philosopher,” these speakers also include historians, linguists, anthropologists, sociologists and literary critics. I might have to reconsider about literary critics.) What is interesting here is that the phrase “art for art’s sake” gets a little more sympathy from such speakers. At first glance that seems odd, because presumably the same elite who decide what constitutes Knowledge are also the elite who decide what constitutes Art. Still, within a given society, pretty much everybody agrees on what constitutes Money, and artists are assumed not to come from money, have money, earn money, or know what to do with money, unless buying more Burnt Sienna counts. So there’s less resentment involved.

But there is another sort of idea that comes along with “knowledge for knowledge’s sake.” Not too surprisingly, I have mostly heard this idea expounded by individuals who have doctoral degrees in the humanities and jobs in apparently unrelated fields, and from those who were in doctoral programs in humanities until they realized that jobs would not be forthcoming if they actually finished the program and thus sidled out with a Masters degree and a really good sense of how to do research. Both groups say the same thing, and what they say reminds me of what I was told in high school about the Necessity to Learn Algebra: “It Will Teach You How to Think.”

Now as a general rule, I would rather be taught how to think than what to think, and I have experienced both states of learning in different ways, having spent eleven years in Catholic school (where my siblings and I stood a much smaller chance of getting beat up than we did in the public schools of our town in that time). Since I began teaching college freshman composition in 1993, I have seen an astronomical need for the teaching of critical thinking; what I learned in junior high and high school, students might learn in college if they are lucky and/or possessed of enough curiosity; for many, these things are never taught or learned. Where socio-economic class fits into this equation, I’m not quite sure, since I’ve seen kids from struggling families excel out of shear cussedness (and I mean that in a good way). I came from a family that was, in terms of education, upper middle class, and in terms of economics, ranging from lower to upper middle class (and back again) back and forth over the years, as the national economy carved switchbacks in the national experience.

But here’s the thing: I lived on the corner of a block that, if we labeled the corners A, B, C, and D as they do in geometry classes, meant our house was at point A and the local library was at point B. From second grade on, I could borrow books about anything without ever having to even cross a street. And that’s power, regardless of social class or economics.

Lang, Andrew. The Library. The Art at Home Series. London: MacMillan, 1881.

Books Behind Bars

2008-01-11T14:24:00.000-08:00

We interrupt these antiquarian reflections for a public service message.

This week, Northeastern University’s newspaper had a profile on Prison Book Program (PBP), a non-profit that sends books to prisoners. “The volunteers open letters from inmates requesting specific titles or genres of books, and match tem as best they can with titles donated by local philanthropists, professors or publishing companies” (Larocque 5). PBP has “served more than 100,000 prisoners in the last three years” (Capalbo 6), an impressive achievement for such a tiny organization relying solely on volunteers working out of the basement of a tiny bookstore in Quincy, MA.

But it also brings up some of the problems with our corrections system. As volunteer Pam Boiros points out, “Seventy-five percent of prisoners today reoffend, and are readmitted [to prisons]…. It’s called recidivism. The only thing proven to reduce the recidivism rates is when people get educated” (qtd. in Larocque 5). But the American prison system, the largest in the world, focuses on punishment rather than rehabilitation. Prison libraries, whey they exist at all, are notoriously small, and most prisons have a rule that prisoners can’t receive books from individuals. Hence, the PBP.

The most commonly requested materials are dictionaries (PBP currently has none in stock), GED exam preparation books, books on Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, Westerns, and business books. PBP also tries to keep books on LGBT issues, Buddhism, native American topics and legal self-help, as these topics are also frequently sought.

Since I was at a 50%-off sale at a local second-hand bookstore yesterday, I picked up a few such books along with the ones for my work, and I’ll be sending them along with a few new dictionaries in a few days. (See address below.) I encourage you to join me in making the world a safer place. Remember, books change minds; minds change lives.

Prison Book Program
c/o Lucy Parsons Bookstore
1306 Hancock St., Ste. 100
Quincy, MA 02169

Capalbo, Danielle. “Reading into the Facts on Prisoners, Literacy.” The Northeastern News 7 Jan. 2008: 6.
Larocque, Mark. “Local Non-profit Puts Books Behind Bars.” The Northeastern News 7 Jan. 2008: 5-6.

In Search of Old Books: The Algorithm

2007-09-30T08:18:00.000-07:00

Dear heavens, I have become a book snob. I don’t mean by this that I read Proust or collect first-edition anything. But in an antiquarian jaunt with my friend H. a few weeks ago, I went to a second-hand store and a Rare Book Shop and yes, gentle reader, I learned some things about myself.

First, I learned that disordered books bother me. I don’t mean that books need to be alphabetical. I would begin by recommending books not be tossed into a bin, even if they are being sold for 50 cents; rather they ought to be lined up with spines out so that people can read them and they can more easily advertise themselves to passers-by without undue bruising. If they are placed on bookshelves for perusal, let them also be grouped with their fellows according to some broad subject—say, Fiction vs. Nonfiction. Is this too much to ask?

It also occurred to me that I am downright mathematical when buying books. When a title has caught my attention and the book seems interesting and physically whole, I very quickly run through the following equation:

S
--- x R = V,
C

where (as my MIT students would say) C is cost; S is shelf space taken up by the book; R is the number of times I will reread the book; and V is total value. All of this, of course, takes place without much conscious thought.

Lastly, I admit to the sin of being somewhat influenced by the book’s cover. Not always; after all, you can’t judge, etc. But let’s face it. Given that I look to books not just for their content—knowledge, if you will—but also for the comfort knowledge brings me, a cover design that conveys order (through symmetry perhaps) or calm (through careful modulation of color) or, well, class (probably some gold leaf), that is a cover that is going to have some effect on my decision to by the book.

I’ll figure out the math of it later.

Book Selves, Part 1

2007-09-08T19:11:00.000-07:00

“The personal library is often in a sense the embodiment of the spirit of its collector and owner. It certainly is a striking manifestation of his tastes, habits, character and pursuits.” –Noah Porter

Someone, and I can’t remember who, once said that books are the furniture of the mind. To some extent, this is true. Indeed, whenever my life begins to change in big ways, two things happen: I dream of being in houses—moving, renovating, discovering hidden rooms—and I rearrange my books. Medieval history gives way to poetry, which bows out in favor of theology. Self-help drifts away to be replaced by small collections of essays: Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris, Akiko Busch’s The Geography of Home, Barbara Kingsolver’s Small Wonder, some Emerson, Stevenson, and Ruskin. Books on business squeeze together to make room for books on Victorian home life over here and World War II over there. Suddenly, piled up in front of biographies, I have a stack of books loosely concerning ethics that I don’t even know what to do with: Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, and Elliott Dorff’s The Way into Tikkun Olam: Repairing the World. A few weeks ago, my roommate asked, “How do you keep in your head what’s in all of these books?” I told her it’s the other way around. The books are annexes of my brain, a kind of offsite long-term memory storage.

Or perhaps “brain” is the wrong word here. As Noah Porter, once the president of Yale, wrote, “the growth of a library when it is unconstrained by hindrances or influences from without, is a record and memorial of the growth and changes of the owner’s intellect and tastes, and perhaps of sudden or gradual transformations in his aims and principles” (363). Of course, our aims and principles never grow only in the fertile but dry soil of intellect. Passion is the motivating principle, whether it is a passionate curiosity about how we came to live the way we do now, or a passionate disgust that so many millions died brutal deaths sixty-five years ago, or a passionate yearning to begin to make the world a better place, starting right here where I live and eat and read.

Half the time, I don’t even realize a change has happened in my life until I see how much change has happened on my shelves. So in that sense, the books are mirrors, reflecting me back to myself. In them, I see my dreams. I discovered this for the first time in fifth grade when I read The Hobbit. Listening to the dwarves singing, “the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic…. Then something… woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick” (Tolkien 28). Almost thirty years later, I have seen such sights in Vermont and Switzerland and Japan. I know, more or less, how to use three different kinds of swords, although they abide in my closet with the laundry rather than on my belt. But when I read those words now, I still feel the sudden chill of recognition. I am again, the child I was at eleven, yearning for adventures, while at the same time I am the forty-year-old woman, remembering adventures I’ve had.

Time is irrelevant to memory, and so also to books. I read Shogun now and instantly I am a high school freshman at my summer job, reading it for the first time in the dimness of Sunshine Preschool during naptime; I am the twenty-two-year old, standing jetlagged in the Ginza district of Tokyo at night, surrounded by neon signs above and tulips below; I am the middle-aged woman reading the thick, battered paperback in front of me while eating noodles from a bowl I bought in Japan two decades before. These selves can never leave me. Books bring them back where I can see them, and momentarily be them, again.

Strangers and even friends reading my shelves can never know the portfolio of selves my soul holds. It’s one thing to say, “Show me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are,” but that telling can never be a complete description because the person cannot also tell, as I can, who I have been, and so the “who you are” is woefully incomplete.

We change. Old selves drift to the back of consciousness, never wholly lost, always ready to be called back by a familiar phrase or scent. For booklovers, our shelves reflect these changes, showing the outer world what is currently true about us. As Lauren Winner writes, “I have learned by now that the first sign of my waning passion for something is losing interest in the books. It’s like being about to break up with someone. The first thing that happens when I lose interest in some man is that my libido lapses into a coma... I’d rather have him stuck over in the corner by the desk than anywhere near my bed” (283). As with our old books and loves, so with our old selves. Sometimes it’s just easier to put them away, move them down to a lower shelf of consciousness, or box them up out of sight. But they are never gone.

Porter, Noah. Books and Reading. New York: Scribner’s, 1888.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit. New York: Ballantine, 1973.
Winner, Lauren F. Girl Meets God. New York: Shaw, 2001.

Borges, St. Catherine, and the Dewey Decimal System

2007-08-27T16:39:00.000-07:00

“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

2007-08-25T17:37:00.000-07:00

“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

2007-08-24T13:51:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-23T15:48:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-19T19:07:00.000-07:00

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.