Miscellany, 4

Intermezzo; Books Read and Unread, but not ignored

For Jonathan Elmer, mon semblable, mon frère

I have seldom rejected the chance to acquire one more book. Each volume new to me is a window into the world of another being, and mostly my opportunity to escape, during the act of reading, the cage and burden of my own self, of my chatty and insecure consciousness, and become someone whose life has a clear final period and not the unfinished business of each individual existence. In this sense I am, more than a voyeur, a hypocrite, as Baudelaire once suggested. I read so as not to be: lego ergo non sum. I can close the book I am reading and terminate the people therein, and walk away scot free, never to be charged with homicide or with kidnapping so many characters in the shelves of a bookcase.

            I read, yet I do not read so much, so constantly (a hypocrite cannot afford constancy) as some people I know. Perhaps I used to read more. I remember as a young man hurrying home from the bus stop in order to delve again into the fictional hardware store of my novel du jour. This seldom happens now; perhaps I have read too many books already, or perhaps, far from my teenage years, I no longer need to escape the non-fictional world of my family (a group with one egregious defect: that they were mine, inescapably mine, allotted to me by the caustic cosmic lottery).

            I buy books, I find them, people give them to me, I have stolen (I mean “borrowed”) one or two. Books enter my house and gather here, edging out space for paintings, bibelots, gadgets, photographs, and, simply, air space. The volumes that were windows of freedom have ended up closing me in like prison bars. Or they are cocooning me in some weird reverse metamorphosis where my imago will crawl back into a shell of paper stained with ink and be a pupa encased there, so quiet, so slow and yet so temporal, and wait to become a larva, an egg to be reborn. My books are my prison in another sense: they are my guardians; they have formed my way of thinking. Perhaps I should say they have deformed my thinking; I have had multiple births emerging from their ova.

There are three kinds of books in my disorganized, spotty library: the books I have read, the books I had once planned to read, and the books that, with their fancy bindings, just look good on a shelf. The books I have yet to read, those I have condemned to patience, wait (as I flatter myself) for me to hatch them and become the parent of their silent prodigality and awake them into a new life (no book is read the same way by more than one reader) in the palpitations of my brain. There, as in a giddy champagne-laced debutante ball, the new book will mingle with the motley crew of my memory: my recollections and, mostly, all the shards of all the once-read books that have stayed there, aging now, perhaps untrue to their original selves, their once-shiny clothes frayed at the edges, but ever willing to come back to the fray.

            I call these, I should call these once-read volumes, my masters. They are Virgil to my Dante, Quixote to my Panza, Ishmael to my… Oh, wait: I have not yet read Moby Dick in its entirety. (No narrator, I have decided, will ever sound convincing without gushing out a confession here and there. Who wants to hear from he who hath never sinned? A narrative works when it is a stone cast precisely by one who knows the nature of sin. Purity makes for pasty pablum, a purina that needs more than a pinch of salt.)

            But wait. Speaking of my unborn Ahab, I now realize there is a fourth category of books operative in my mind: the books other readers have told me about. I have, in some way, also read those by way of their admirer’s praise and detail. Could Rose of Sharon be more real to me in Steinbeck than she was in my friend Jonathan’s teary rendition of the barn scene towards the end of Grapes of Wrath? Probably not; reading is a mimetic desire, but sometimes I feel that my imitation love will never come up to the heat of the first lover—I suspect Rose of Sharon’s breastfeeding will not move me to tears—and I abandon the attempt. Let them read cake.

            For I am easily distracted. I am far from a mystic. Where the mystic will lay on the bosom of the godhead and feel the permanence of peace, I would immediately perk up with a cursory thank-you-ma’am wondering if it is lunchtime yet. Which brings me to the fifth category of books in what I shamelessly call my library: those reference tomes that by their sheer heft seem disdainful of the anorexic paperbacks they so authoritatively displace. I love those know-it-all bullies. My favorite is a 2,260-page copy of a 1934 edition of Merriam’s Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language. For such a behemoth the book is agile, concise, no-nonsense; it dishes out laconic, understated meaning, accompanied by natty pen drawings and quite a few plates and charts (flags of all nations!) to guide my perplexities into the light, or the illusion, of sense—etymology added as a bonus. Hooray to the Messrs. W. T. Harris and F. Sturges Allen (or are those initials female?) who kneaded that holy mess of words into the tether of their alphabetical order.

            Having several reference books in my room distorts or redirects the manner in which I read. I am, as I said, easily distracted. The pretentious T. S. Eliot oraculates his “distracted from distraction by distraction” and this phrase, alas, describes me as a reader. I read a page, two… then I encounter a word I didn’t know and off I go fishing with Webster’s web. Or I read about a personage, an event, a place, and off it is to encyclopedias, histories, almanacs, compendiums, miscellanies, vade-mecums, Baedekers, atlases, collections, bibliographies, collected works, and even the OED (in that compact edition requiring loupe and a teenager’s eyesight, an edition many in my generation acquired as bait and bonus by gingerly subscribing to the Book-of-the-Month Club, before such ingenious and complicated ruses to sell books met their millennial demise).

            So when I read in my paper-and-ink insulated prison I jump, I move, I consider the thickness of what is left to read in a novel, I decide to check something out, or read a poem. Poets sneak under the radar of my reference mania with the short shrapnel of their compositions. Or, dang it, I get up and go to my machine to type something I will for a short while believe my own, but eventually come to realize it is a regurgitation of Borges, of Maugham, of Nabokov, of Unamuno, of Vilallonga, of Wolf (always telling me not to be stingy with descriptions), of Neruda, of that old but insuperable Guilhem de Peitieu, and I come up for air, and then I pen (I mine the computer’s black up to its clear screen in some undercurrent from the heart of darkness), I pen something like what you have here to read, my reader, this intermezzo, something meshed into the middle of that longer story never to be complete. This tainted entertainment that is I and not I. That will be you and not you. That might be a drop in the cosmic and living soup of literature.