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.

The Light, Motherhood, and Abortion

Something else interests me in the two lines I pointed out from The Stranger--both bring up the question of control and responsibility. Meursault states that it comes down to a choice: he can either shoot or not shoot. He has the ability, the free will, to do one or not do one. In this way, it is simple. Do or do not. He can choose--but does he? After he pulls the trigger, regardless of why, he states that he himself shattered his own happiness. He accepts the agency for his actions. The "why" doesn't matter.

R.'s point about the light as connected to Meursault's mother brings me to another similarity between The Stranger and Play It As It Lays. The main character, Maria, also connects her mother, and her mother's death, to the sunlight: "Maria did not know whether any of that had actually happened but she used to think it, used to think it particularly around the time the sun set in New York, think about the mother dying in the desert light, the daughter unavailabe in the Eastern dark."

One of the book's main themes is motherhood, and the entire novel centers on Maria's abortion and subsequent need to play the role of the perfect mother for her daughter, Kate, who is in a hospital for a mental and physical condition and cannot be what Maria wishes. Still, as if in penance for the abortion, Maria determines that she will get Kate out of the hospital, live with her on her own, and take up canning, the kind of domestic act that would prove her fit for motherhood. It is Kate that gives Maria purpose, if not reason.

One last quote about the light, as tied to life, death, and motherhood: "She cried because something had just come through to her, there in the sun on the Western street: she had deliberately not counted the months but she must have been counting them unawares, must have been keeping a relentless count somewhere, because this was the day, the day the baby would have been born."

More thoughts later on abortion--and what it might mean to be addicted to it.

--C.

The White Album

A blank page. More than a blank page: Electronic white space infinitely expanding and only as tangible as a screen. Ink and paper gives way to pixels and codes, and still we write and discuss. Stone tablets and papyrus, now this. It is not the medium that matters but the words. At least, we want them to, need them to.

And so, R., I am listening. So we begin. What is more fitting than to start with the alternately daunting and exciting prospect of so much white space? It brings us right to the two novels we discuss the most and the two authors we come back to again and again. I am talking about Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays and Albert Camus' The Stranger (of course, the photo from Café de Flore also inspired this post). Whiteness, the brightness of the sun, as if the essence is contained in vast nothingness.

From L'Etranger: "We stared at each other without blinking, and everything came to a stop there between the sea, the sand, and the sun, and the double silence of the flute and the water. It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot."

From Play It: "When that failed she imagined herself driving, conceived audacious lane changes, strategic shifts of gear, the Hollywood to the San Bernadino and straight on out, past Barstow, past Baker, driving straight on into the hard white empty core of the world. She slept and did not dream."

In her essay, "Why I Write," Didion discusses writing Play It: "I had only two pictures in my mind ... and a technical intention, which was to write a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all. About the pictures: the first was of white space. Empty space. This was clearly the picture that dictated the narrative intention of the book -- a book in which anything that happened would happen off the page, a 'white' book to which the reader would have to bring his or her own bad dreams."

The elliptical is also the lyrical. Both Camus and Didion are masters of style with sentences that are as much a part of the story as the narratives themselves. R -- your turn on Meursault and the sun. How about these lines: "I shook off the sweat and sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy."

And speaking of lyrical -- readers, check out R.'s translation of Camus' Notebooks 1951-1959.

-- C.