Library Thoughts
My library surrounds and admonishes me. I read a reference to Thoreau’s Walden just now, remembering again that I started an annotated edition, marveling at the contemporary feel of the writing, but then set it down. Since then, I’ve read from his journals, finished a spiritual biography of him, and started a more conventional one. I also read Stanley Cavell’s The Senses of Walden, the book that first attracted me to him. So, not entirely a bust. But the main book remains where I left it on the shelf. Other books, authors or topics that I sought to open, are untouched.
I’m not the only reader faced with this dilemma. Some argue that assembling a library doesn’t commit you to reading all of it. Sometimes, looking at it, I have an urge to cull it in the Marie Kondo manner. There are certainly some titles that could go, but others — an example is a collection of books on structuralism — retain their hold on me. To organize them would also be a good idea, as many are buried behind others in doubled rows. This could be a project, to reacquaint myself with my books, organize them, and skim off anything that that can be safely skimmed.
But equally, I could commit myself to a reading program. I did this two summers ago, but then stopped instead of forging on to read the main works of my subject, Walter Benjamin. I read a few things, but not systematically. In any activity of this sort, time is the crucial dimension. This is the model of pedagogy, but I found it trying to jam a syllabus into 10, 12, or 15 weeks. I don’t read that way. So, I need to set out a syllabus and set the right pace.
Buying books is a vice, a form of gluttony, eyes bigger than my brain’s capacity to absorb it all. I try to temper it, but every year, when I tote it up, books are big item. The literary reviews and the cultural supplements do their part of whet my appetite, but often the book disappoints. Many books are readily conveyed in articles and reviews. It’s probably best to acknowledge this. Books are also hyped as brilliant that prove otherwise when you read them. There are clues — endorsements by business leaders, for example. Virginia Woolf found contemporary fiction problematic, preferring the work of writers of earlier generations. The passage of time winnows the field down.
This distance makes it easier to recognize generational tics and consider, on balance, what else is there. A writer like Natalia Ginzburg or Penelope Fitzgerald may have staying power because her mind was elsewhere or unclouded by ego, ambition, machismo in its male and female forms. If writing is an experiment and/or a need, then some distance in time makes it clearer what worked and/or what was worth the effort. Could I act on this?
Looking back, a good deal of my “deciding” was in reality letting time pass in order to discover what did and didn’t have a real claim on my interest. Buying books is analogous to the way we’re always looking around us, wondering what we’re missing, adding goals and ambitions to to-do lists, New Year’s resolutions, and diaries. A library brings these impulses — expressed as purchases — along with it, whereas in life we eventually let them go. In short, a library embodies this looking around. That mine is overgrown and disorganized also says something.
As the leitmotif of my working life, which was both focused and productive, leisure’s laissez-faire qualities were attractive. It’s only now, when leisure takes center stage, that focus and productivity arise as issues. Despite its impromptu nature, I got a fair amount done outside of work. Indeed, I owe my last 22-year assignment to this. But turning to it, considering what I have in mind — experiments and needs alike — it warrants rethinking.
And yet this too is episodic. Despite the “laissez-faire” above, getting things done is a lifetime issue. I’ve always had a strong imagination that actively substituted for tangibility at different points. I connect it to poetry, which is the slimmest form by which something imagined or intuited is brought into the world. I’ve always written shorter rather than longer pieces, by preference but also by necessity. It’s odd that I’ve sometimes dreamt of entire cities, including what I believed to be the City of God that Augustine described, a place of uncanny beauty. Beauty attracts me and strikes me as the only reason for being — something that arises in countless guises. As a child, I was fascinated by the colors of gasoline floating on water, and also by the way pooled water animated small landscapes. I could extrapolate nature from the smallest instances of it, and beauty seemed to be their common feature.
Beauty is tangible. So much hinges on this. It runs across the senses, and words run after it; the arts, also. It gets us in trouble and drives life forward. There are no norms for it, as we’re born into myriad individual relations with it that we replicate, vary, and extend. Words are primary for me, but my mind is suffused with beauty that was tangible in ways that I can only hint at by that means. Experimenting with them reflects a need: to set down a life amid so much beauty, even when it was pained or painful. We live in this manner, too. Or I have lived like this. I can’t speak for any other, but am desirous nonetheless to convey the whole of it. Strange, that desire, as if beauty demanded that we hark back to its indelible moment, etched in memory, and represent it convincingly for others.
