My library, wedged into cardboard boxes since a flood in the studio nearly a year ago, is at last released onto new shelves. Each book was acquired to answer, at a moment of question or desire, a need to telescopically reach beyond my own vision or understanding. Despite being carefully grouped and labeled in boxes they had become mysterious and weighty, not merely heavy. They stacked up like obligations that waited silently for more comfort, order restored, fresher air, light and freedom. And the relief of a reader.
In two days with an assistant who loves books they were released and placed in stacks. I have never been able to scan a conventional bookcase, as in the stacks of a library or bookstore without neck-twisting that made me have to leave unsatisfied. My bookstore and library ventures have never been leisurely browses but are either a dyslexic, efficient and purposeful mission, or a quick impulsive raid. So my own shelves carry their books flat, with the text on their spines arrayed so I can read them. Each shelf is a paragraph of ideas. Each book is an individual treasure. I have abandoned those I would not lend out or read again except for reference texts. In this small library their spines and my own are untwisted.
Touching and remembering these books whose contents have nourished my mind, the information having passed from their pages into my brain’s cells, was a neural re-gathering, a reunion of associations. Now that I am old enough to forget even my own thoughts unless typed-down immediately (I am intentionally filling magnetic memory as a prosthesis that will support failed biological memory later) there is more surprise and delight in the sight of an old familiar but forgotten book-cover, or the handwritten note of an author.
Books must be categorized but ideas should not. Neither books nor ideas fit easily into classifications, they merge into each other suggestively, breaking through the bookends. A book on child development is also a book about the sensory world of the classroom and it’s physical environment, but that may only be one of it’s syncretic connections to many other books. The whole library, mine, yours and worldwide, is a single networking of human ideas present and past, a record of what we are and who we are likely to become again. We do not know it’s whole value unless we keep re-reading.
When I reread a book it is made new again because I am not in the same frame of mind as when I last turned it’s pages. This is a second and maybe the last chance for me to discover what the author was really intending what I think about it. I hope never to have to move my library again and so I will not want to unpack and restack the collection.
But there are accidents in unpacking and the best of these was when a small volume—“One Writer's Beginnings” by Eudora Welty—popped out with the flapping of a jack-in-the-box from inside another book. It had bookmarks within it, and itself had become a bookmark within something fatter but I am sure not better. I had not seen it in years. We yearned suddenly for each other, and this spare spine, now thinner than I remembered, slipped into my hand and then quickly upstairs to my bedside table. My copy is old, and soft, a worn paperback whose cover is an old wrinkled skin. It was published in 1983 by Warner Books, who back then also offered to send any Warner title in print for fifty cents.
This book has been praised by others with more fanfare than I can sing, but no reader could have greater pleasure than myself in it’s reading. Each word is a paragraph, each paragraph a page, and each page worth several books. My reading is going slowly. Each sentence needs re-reading and reading aloud to someone else. The sounds are alive and should be voiced. The words are numinous and associative, directing the reader into another nearly unfathomable mind (Welty’s own). It is a whole world and I read from it and read again to slow time, not wanting the few pages that hold so much to leave me still so hungry staring at the inside of the last empty sheet.