To those of you resolving to clean house in the new year, a word of caution. Throw out whatever you want to throw out — the adorable snapshot of you as a 6-year-old with Roy Rogers’s horse Trigger, that jade bust of Franklin Pierce you picked up for a song at a Vermont auction — but not your old books. Never your old books. It may be tempting to toss them, I know, because they take up so much space and gather so much dust. Yet every book you have is a story of who you are and who you were when you acquired it. And who you became when you read it. It’s part of you, your present and your history. We may think we finish with books, but they don’t finish with us.
Books are houses. Once inside, you’re transformed, and you become the house you entered. I open the doors of “Jane Eyre,” and I’m ushered into the manse of the cold and brooding Rochester. Eventually he thaws, and I grow to like him, feeling comfortable in the house. But what’s that manic laughter coming from the attic?
Just like the various places you have lived in, a good book can never be removed from your memory. In my books I have lived in King Arthur’s castle and in Ralph Ellison’s basement, each beautiful, startling and revelatory of a universe of thought.
Yet the memories can be jarring. I know what I think of my books. What do they think of me? An ignoramus? An innocent? A tabula rasa on whom all these various influences may leave their marks? Someone with the wrong ideas, no ideas?
There have been times when I’ve heard my books talk to me with mocking condescension. “Are you shocked by me?” says Vladimir Nabokov with “Lolita.” “Disgusted? Made uncomfortable in the cellar of a darker (not to say creepier) mind?” “Are you frightened by me?” says Mary Shelley with “Frankenstein.” “Confused? Astonished? Made sad and sympathetic? And who is the monster in the story, anyway? The creation or the creator? And if all that isn’t enough to wonder at, how did this tale come to be written by a 19-year-old girl?”
We read books and books read us, especially if we approach them with easy assumptions. Before I gave it serious thought, I took “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” for a story about a dope addict with mood swings. What Robert Louis Stevenson teaches is that under the influence, a person may be completely and irredeemably changed. The book says, in effect, here in your facile judgment, learn something about our species. Whatever you think impossible in life is possible. Life is stranger and more dangerous than anything you may ever imagine.
And yet more forgiving, too. Here on my shelves is the autobiography of the early 20th-century Scottish poet, novelist and translator Edwin Muir. Muir resists psychotherapy at first, but then sees a therapist and understands its value, writing, “I saw that my lot was the human lot, that when I faced my own unvarnished likeness I was one among all men and women, all of whom had the same desires and thoughts, the same failures and frustrations, the same unacknowledged hatred of themselves and others, the same hidden shames and griefs.” If one is searching for absolution, look no further.
That was a passage I dog-eared years ago, one among hundreds of dog-eared pages in my books. I wonder what sort of book would be produced by linking all the dog-eared pages. Incoherent or inspired? Or the infinite columns of marginalia, standing like beefeater guards beside the original texts. What secret books have I written that hide in all the jottings in the margins?
Bright new books gleam like actors in tryouts, destined to grow gray with faded titles and bends and bruises on the covers.
“Bleak House” went with me to Crane Beach in Ipswich, Mass., when I was studying for a university exam. You can still feel grains of sand in the spine. That beaten-up book, “Childcraft,” came from my parents’ house — a children’s book my mother read to me. I drew pictures next to the poems. A squirrel, a fish, my father’s derby hat.
To say nothing of the nothing of missing books, the spaces created by those reluctantly lent to visitors who never returned them. Does one ever learn not to lend books? It’s grumpy bad manners to deny the borrowers, to be sure. But look at the holes that once held your valuables. Kidnap victims. If only there had been a ransom. Anatole France wrote that the only books he had in his library were those that others had lent him.
Every time one recommends a book to someone else, that book becomes an ambassador, informing and changing minds one will never know about. And who knows how these minds will use their newly gained knowledge.
Henry David Thoreau, Oscar Wilde, Ezra Pound — all three wrote, or were inspired to write, in prison. The thoughts that informed their works were their way of breaking out. Writing a book from prison, Hitler nearly destroyed the world. With another book, Nelson Mandela nearly rescued it.
My books are teachers but also companions who know more than I do, and who in the long run wish me well. I would no sooner get rid of them than I would an old friend.
More like neighbors, standing in their front doors on my shelves, forever extending their welcomes. At night, when my house is dark, and I am asleep, do they whisper to one another? Do they gossip about me? Does Hamlet have the last word, as usual?
Books of poems. Of maps. Of adventure. Of cartoons. Books of photographs. Books on philosophy, psychology, philately, history, mystery, art. Short stories. Tall stories. Ghost stories. Right now I am trying to retrieve a passage of poetry that expresses the power of all my books, making the case for holding on to them more forcefully than I ever could.
Ah. Here it is, “The Far Field,” by Theodore Roethke: “A ripple widening from a single stone / Winding around the waters of the world.”
Roger Rosenblatt is the author of “Making Toast,” “Kayak Morning,” “Cold Moon” and the satirical novel “Lapham Rising.”
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