By Ben Greenman
Time moved my books away from me. Or else it moved me away from my books.
They are on shelves in my house. When I moved in to this house about five years ago, I put them there, all of them. I made a half-hearted attempt to organize them by theme: American novels, British novels, books of poetry, books about authors and poets, books about music, books about history, picture books, funny books, galleys. I gave up midway through but still they looked good on the shelves. They looked comfortable.
The books stayed there on the shelf, but they moved away from me. Except that they weren’t moving. They were shelved. So maybe it’s more accurate to say that I moved away from them. I am often in my house, which means that I’m often around my books, but it got to the point where I didn’t really see them anymore. I can’t even say that it bothered me. I figured that’s what happens when you get older: books recede into the past. I imagined that they were on a raft, drifting out to sea. But no: they were the shore and I was out to sea.
Then came this: the present moment, the pandemic, the quarantine, the distancing from others, the closing in of the walls.
I have been around my wife and children for weeks, daily, but I have not interacted much with anyone else: other family, friends, colleagues, strangers. There are faces I need to see that I am not seeing, except maybe on small screens. This is not a strange story any longer. It is an agonizingly familiar one.
When you cannot be close to the same things, you have two choices. One is to find new things to be close to, and the other is to draw closer to the old things.
That is when I moved closer to my books.
I had tried this once before.
At some point a few years ago, around the time of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I made up a game where I assembled stacks of books that were like totem poles—taken as a set, their titles sent a message. That meant that I had to find the right books, which means that I had to go through all of them, pulling them out from the shelves, turning them over in my hands.
The first stack was explicitly about the election. The foundation was Matthijs van Boxsel’s The Encyclopedia of Stupidity, and it went upward from there: John Fischer’s The Stupidity Problem, Dickens’ Bleak House, Robert Walser’s The Robber, Julia Phillips’ You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again.
I made other stacks for other events after that: for confirmation hearings, for public investigations.
Those stacks were jokes, but they were also jousts, ways of putting a lance into reality and trying to unseat it. They were a way of showing spine.
When this came, all of this, I thought about making a stack about it, but I am not sure what spine is left these days. Reality has put the lance into me.
I went to bed in a room without bookshelves.
*
I go to bed. Not to sleep. I’m not sleeping all that much. I don’t really dream, because I’m not really sleeping. I half-dream. I daydream but it’s night. I half-dream of a fire. And in my dream the fire reads all the books in my house before I can. I know it’s not happening, but in the morning when the light comes in, a (sarcastic?) reminder of the new day, I go and stand in front of the shelf.
I close my eyes. I imagine that I’m reaching out and taking a book. Which one? Any of them would be a seed. Plant a seed and it grows. Plant it in soil that has been frightened by the shaking of the ground all around it, and it will grow with a vigor and ferocity and urgency that is almost a despair.
So I could start with Gunther Grass’s The Flounder. It’s been years since I read it and about a year since I tried to reread it and failed spectacularly. But there’s a line in there that has been swimming around in my head since 1990 or so: “Everything looks normal in print.” Grass was talking about how male dominance in history is a result of control of the press, I think. But now maybe he’s also talking about the normalizing and thus numbing effect of the news: old man dead, young man dead, young woman sick, old woman sicker.
Or I could start with e.e. cummings’ Complete Poems. I love the shiv he puts into Louis Untermeyer in retaliation for Untermeyer including himself (and excluding cummings) from an anthology of modern poetry:
mr u will not be missed
who as an anthologist
sold the many on the few
not excluding mr u
I have been thinking of that in an era when leaders, in the process of trying to convince us that they care for everyone, appear to be self-dealing and self-congratulatory.
I could start with a tiny little Emily Dickinson collection. I have more comprehensive Dickinsons and more beautiful ones. I have ones with better paper stock. This one’s just a Canterbury Classics I picked up a few years ago. But there’s something about the cover, which arranges her words into a labyrinth like the hedge maze in The Shining, that is both garish and comforting. It creates of the poems a series of rich enclosures. Nearly every line moves me somewhere I am not by moving me to see where I am: “The right to perish might be thought / An undisputed right.”
Or there’s Mary Robison, or Maxine Hong Kingston, or Stanley Elkin, or Fran Ross, or Bob Dylan’s Tarantula, or Pat Jordan’s A False Spring, or Mary McCarthy’s The Group, or Guy Colwell’s Inner City Romance, or Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote, or Cervantes’s, a big book that’s a combination memoir/anthology of Milt Gross that I don’t think I’ve ever opened, or a biography of Ezra Pound by John Tytell that I used to know chapter and verse but have mostly forgotten by now. Every one of them helps me do battle with the world as it is these days.
Eyes still closed, I step back from the shelves. Distancing. I realize this has been an error, correct it. The closer I get to the books, the more I feel their energy, not the specific energy of any one volume, but the collective energy of all of them. The metaphor is still a seed, but it’s not one seed sprouting into one shoot. It’s a seed vault, for words, for ideas, for risks, for rewards, questions, answers, everything.
Now I am close enough to reach out and touch the spine of the nearest book. I don’t know which book it is, but it doesn’t matter. Touching one book is a form of touching all of them. I don’t need to open my eyes. The books can pass through closed eyes. I don’t have to worry about their survival—even if the fire reads them all, they’ll still be here). And I don’t have to worry about mine. Reconnecting with one book is a form of reconnecting with them all. They’re in my mind, in fragments, along filaments, and that’s more than enough. That’s how I’ll restart, how I’ll always restart, with half-grasped memories of once-touched volumes. This time, this strange sad time, is moving me closer to my books, and them closer to me. In a strange way, I’d have to say, I’m grateful.
