Bookkeeping: Dreams of My Own Library

Sometimes I sit in bed and surround myself with books. Usually it’s a weekend morning before I have fully woken up, and I’m wrapped in my sweater coat—picture an afghan with a hood and sleeves. A cup of tea steams on the nightstand. The books sink between folds of quilt and sit on top of pillows. I’ve pulled off the shelf any novel or essay collection that might offer an inspiring sentence or paragraph and allow me to think in that slow, thoughtful way where ideas and images take their time shifting across my consciousness. I flip through the books, read a page here, a line there. Sometimes I know what I’m looking for, a section underlined in pencil or notes in the margin. Other times, I let the covers fall open to see what a book wants to tell me. I pretend it does, in fact, want to tell me something, and it’s fun for the moment.

It’s not just that the books are imparting a message. It’s that the writers are speaking. They put themselves into these works. I’m sitting in bed surrounded by books, but really I’m surrounded by voices, by people, by the lives and intellects of writers whose words endure. The paperbacks and hardbound works wait for me on my shelves. The physical books are comforting. I can keep them and open them when I need to, and they feed my imagination and take me out of myself. Having them neatly lined on the shelves is soothing. They remind me of the work I want to do and the things that I have learned and studied. Too much of the everyday makes us forgetful of art and thinking and ideas. Books counteract the routine.

So it is always with some consternation that I try to explain this to people who don’t desire shelves filled with books. They don’t seem to understand. They want to know why I keep so many volumes, especially because I have had to move frequently over the past few years. Yes, I keep taking my books with me. Everything else in my life may be transitory, but at least they last. Friends who have helped me move refer to my “library.” The truth is I do want my own library. I want an entire room filled with books. Maybe I could even get one of those ladders that wheels across the shelves. And maybe a secret passageway behind one—yeah, I’d like that. That would be like living in a book.

I learned recently that one of my relatives won’t let her husband keep too many books because they collect dust. They also pile up if you love them as much as I do—but isn’t that why shelves were invented? While I understand the avoidance of clutter, it never crossed my mind that books would constitute clutter or that anyone would actually believe they did. The situation perplexed me.

Of course, for other people, it’s not books. They feel the way I feel about books when it comes to vinyl records or surfboards or baseball cards or antique trains or paintings (my relative has many of those on her walls, so for her, I realize, it is art). I can appreciate these kinds of collections. The saving, the preserving, the reminders of what we’re passionate about. They are the things we keep because they say something about who we are.

This past weekend, I had to pack—again. Maybe it’s because I don’t know exactly where I’m going yet, but whatever the reason, it was particularly painful to take the books off the shelves. The set of Joan Didion first editions, the series of Virginia Woolf books—they were in their place, and putting them into storage felt neglectful and wrong. I set a few choice books in a bag to keep with me while I find a new stopover. That seemed to help. In any case, it will have to do. Moving my books time after time can feel like an impractical and unnecessary burden. But they make me happy—in the same way R. says sports and music (and his books, too) make him happy.

I’m hoping they—I—will soon be in a new home—but that’s just it; for so long I haven’t felt like I’ve been in a home, only temporary way stations. And maybe the real reason I refuse to give up my stacks of novels and story collections is because I don’t have a place where I belong. Instead, wherever I go, my books make me feel at home.

—C.