A library as a life’s companion
A recent conversation with two friends, touching on how our personal libraries figure in our respective lives, led me to think about mine, which resides in the house and in the “barn” or writing shed in the back garden.
My attitude toward it varies. Sometimes it weighs on me. One section is a reasonably complete set of introductory books on structuralism. It’s gone out of fashion since I acquired them. They sit unread, reflecting my tendency to anticipate a deeper dive that sometimes comes to naught. Another shelf has the collected works (in translation) of Walter Benjamin, along with one of two intellectual biographies of him that I read over a summer. I also read some of his works, several of which are on other shelves. As this suggests, finding specific books isn’t always easy.
One friend has noted that I retain a great deal of what I read. When I left graduate school, I vowed I would never again read at that inhuman pace. So, I haven’t, which is why it took me most of a summer to read those two Benjamin biographies. During the five years I was a visiting scholar, I read books from the 1960s and 1970s that discussed the forms city-making should take. Most of these books are in my library, although I couldn’t find one and ended up buying it and two others. I read them over the course of another summer, then wrote a paper and an article. I had to reread one of them in part to bring the full argument (the author was Italian) back to mind. In the case of another book, one of its illustrations summed things up. I rarely make notes now when I read, finding them less and less useful.
When my visiting scholar appointment ended, I had already begun to write fiction, which draws eclectically on its sources. This led me to see myself as a liberal artist and my library as a companion rather than an informant.
My library is also mnemonic or visually prompting. Its few blank walls have calligraphy or brushwork given to me by one of the two friends on my call, and my daughter. The other friend is represented by a drawing he gave me, now on a shelf, and a book on another. Other things remind me of specific people. There are some books related to a few of them, either because they made and gave them to me or because I wrote about them.
My library is an archive, then, housing my diaries (with one lost exception, about which I recently wrote some poems) and correspondence. I rarely reread this material, as I remember the content or it wells up in fragments, but occasionally I come across a letter or, on a whim, pull a diary out. (My diaries are handwritten, an obstacle to casual reading.)
In my current relationship with my library, its indeterminacy is a virtue, making it companiable in a way that’s appropriate to my domestic life. The painter Duncan Grant made the house he shared with Vanessa Bell the subject of his late paintings, finding himself alone in it. (He painted it before, but typically with people in it.) The companionship of a library is a rehearsal perhaps for the way life deprives us of others.
The barn houses my collection, also disorganized, of CDs, mostly classical music. Listening to Schubert sonatas for violin and piano, a long-estranged someone came to mind. I imagined this person simply reappearing, having assumed correctly that we’d pick up the thread, whatever it might be.
Where threads are concerned, of course, one never knows. I try not to push, as often it’s just “pushing on string” or “pushing the river,” as Fritz Perls put it. I still mark occasions that mattered once, as they take on a life of their own, I find, a bit like books that found a place on my shelves and sit there now in august indifference or perhaps with admirable patience. I haven’t always been so patient, but seem, at the 11th hour, to be the liberal artist life intended, my library companiably suited to my rambling, discursive nature.
