Book lust and ‘paradise as a kind of library’
Though I had assured my Smoky Mountain News editor I’d deliver a real book review this week — my to-read stack includes biographies of Karl Marx and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a novel, two books of essays on education, and more — book-centered distractions in late May led me in a different direction.
While celebrating a high school graduation, I stayed in an Airbnb in a small Virginia town with one of my sons and his family. Mix together the movie “Night at the Museum,” a thrift store, and an eerily abandoned household, like something from “The Twilight Zone,” and you’ve got the picture. Built in 1868, this three-story house displayed collections of Soviet paraphernalia: original posters of Lenin, Stalin and Gorbachev, Russian medals and flags, and books in Russian or about Russia, all gathered by a couple who, from what I could tell, had worked at the State Department and taught Russian history and literature.
Here as well were two score and more paintings and photographs of beagles, accompanied by a plaque on the front porch declaring the property a beagle art museum. On one of the crowded shelves was a stuffed coyote. Every drawer in the entire place was filled with memorabilia, playing cards, stationary, and other trinkets. One entire cabinet was given over to candlesticks and fancy candelabra. Above the stove in the main kitchen were 150 bottles of spices or more, all arranged in rows. In the nearby “summer kitchen” was a refrigerator jammed with all sorts of foodstuffs. The third floor was a stand-up attic and a lone bedroom whose isolation and surrounding shadows spooked the grandchildren, including the teens, and so remained empty.
Adding to the fun and weirdness were hundreds of books. An 11-volume set of “The Story of Civilization” by Will and Ariel Durant — I own one of these myself — was surrounded by novels I’d never heard of. The works of Solzhenitsyn fought for shelf space with the fiery speeches by Lenin. Books of maps and geography — and of course, of dogs and beagles — abounded.
It was nuts. Though I wasn’t tempted, or at least, not too much — I’ve broken enough commandments without adding theft to the list — any lodger in this madhouse carnival of treasure and junk might have easily toted away a suitcase filled with books and objects d’art and no one the wiser.
Eight days later, however, again on a graduation jaunt, this time to Pennsylvania, I had to battle a more severe case of book lust. In a long hallway on the second floor of the school where my son-in-law teaches were thousands of books arranged helter-skelter on shelves made of cinder blocks and raw wood. Here were hundreds of different Civil War histories, hundreds more histories and biographies, several score of Penguin classics, religious books centered on Catholicism, a good number of juvenile classics, including a score or more of the G.A. Henty historical novels, and more.
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There the books sat, unread, unsold and apparently unwanted. For about an hour, the mad thought infected me that I could drain my pathetic savings, offer the school several thousand dollars for the books, enlist the boys enrolled there to load them into a U-Haul, and take them — where? I’m too old to open a secondhand bookstore as I did 40 years ago, and too busy and broke to open an online shop featuring this ton or more of paper and print.
That same realization about my age versus my desire brought to mind the narrowing days available to me in this life. On the shelves of my own library sit several hundred books: beloved works from my adolescence, novels from my 20s and 30s when writers like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe were my literary heroes, the histories, cultural studies, and collections of essays that for the last 30 years have served as my mainstay of reading. In this hodge-podge of print are books as yet unread, signposts of warning that the purchase of such a gargantuan load of literature would reveal me as bibliomaniac, an addict or a simpleton — or more likely, all three rolled into one.
For all devotees of books and reading, maybe death and the grave are the only real end to love of the printed word.
Or maybe not.
In 1955, the wonderful writer Luis Borges was appointed director of the Argentine National Library. By the end of that decade, he was completely blind. Aware of his fading eyesight, in 1958 he wrote “Poem of the Gifts.” Here’s one translation of the first stanza:
No one should read self-pity or reproach
into this statement of the majesty
of God, who with such splendid irony
granted me books and blindness in one touch.
From this poem comes a line, loosely translated, that became Borges’ trademark quotation: “I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.”
Now we’re talking. Appoint Jerome and Scholastica, patron saints of books and readers, as head librarians in that bibliotheca, perhaps an ever-expanding archive of the stories of each individual human soul. Add quiet alcoves with chairs that beg for readers. Throw in some coffee shops, pubs, and sun-struck courtyards for conversations with friends old and new.
In such a Borgesian paradise may all booklovers one day find their bliss.
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
