The jackets are torn, disfigured by bar codes, pages stained, mementos falling out — clippings, cards, photos. The book as palimpsest, the opposite of the skull on the desk, not memento mori but unum quod potest ire in, “one that may go on”.
I am not a collector, not a bibliophile. Over 50 years I have moved several thousand books out of my keeping. I have culled the darlings repeatedly. It’s not about this title or first editions.
It is about the book.
The book is the thing I hold in my hands that I may never lay aside. The book is the opening, the sequence begun when I was 3, the geometric progression that will end only with me. A book leads to books. It has always been thus.
Recently I spent 20 minutes talking with a friend about when we read this one or that, remembering the room, even the moment of entrancement, reciting first sentences to each other:
A screaming comes across the sky. The cell door slammed behind Rubashov. Through the fence … I could see them hitting. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead …. It rained for millions of years.
I bought Gravity’s Rainbow for $5 at a Kutztown bookstore with money I earned as a janitor. I began to read it in my apartment in the spring of ‘73. I jabbered about it to profs. I read deep into each night.
Dr. Thomas had us read The Sound and the Fury. I felt unmoored until a friend told me, “It’s golf, They’re playing golf,” and then his sentences made sense but not in the old world I had known. This was a new place, shocked through with the new on each page. This poor, ignorant Pennsylvania boy walked into the south, this other country.
The library at Sacred Heart Grammar School was the width of two closets, and extended from the hallway to a window. In third grade it seemed huge. Two rows of rickety metal bookcases were twice as tall as me, but I found The History Of Earth at eye level, and I remember thinking, “How could someone write a book about the entire earth?” The Sisters let me take it home, and I sat in the living room with one sliver of dark chocolate and was quiet until I finished.
I made my living with books. Now, I work at a bookstore. This paper and glue and ink and aroma and weight is a form of memory. In our amnesiac present, with media of all types employing saturation and light speed as the standards of communication, what better gift to give or receive. Books are eros, they are romance, they are the past in the present, they are the list in my money clip, the stacks in the bookcase my father built, the books I will read, the books I keep close no matter what.
