Why Keep Books?The southern beaches of Uruguay did not give me the impression of a dirty windscreen on a rainy day. Perhaps it was the immensity of the sky, the wilderness of sand and wind, added to Carlos Brauer's story, which in my mind linked the coast of Rocha with windscreens and the panic I feel whenever someone praises all the books I possess. Every year I give away at least fifty of them to my students, yet I still cannot avoid putting in another double row of shelves; the books are advancing silently, innocently through my house. There is no way I can stop them.I have often asked myself why I keep books that could only ever be of any use in a distant future, titles remote from my usual concerns, those I have read once and will not open again for many years, if ever! But how could I throw away The Call of the Wild, for example, without destroying one of the building bricks of my childhood, or Zorba the Greek, which brought my adolescence to a tear-stained end, The Twenty-Fifth Hour and all those other volumes consigned to the topmost shelves, where they lie untouched and silent in that sacred trust of which we are so proud.
It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there, it is part of us. I have noticed that many people make a note of the day, month, and year that they read a book; they build up a secret calendar. Others, before lending one, write their name on the flyleaf, note whom they lent it to in an address book, and add the date. I have known some book owners who stamp them or slip a card between their pages the way they do in public libraries. Nobody wants to mislay a book. We prefer to lose a ring, a watch, our umbrella, rather than a book whose pages we will never read again, but which retains, just in the sound of its title, a remote and perhaps long-lost emotion.
The truth is that in the end, the size of a library does matter. We lay the books out for inspection like a huge exposed brain, offering miserable excuses and feigned modesty. I once knew a professor of classical languages who deliberately took his time preparing the coffee in his kitchen so that his visitor could admire the titles on his shelves. When he could tell the effect had been achieved, he would appear in the room with the tray and a broad smile.As readers, we spy on our friends' libraries, if only as a pastime. Occasionally we hope to find a book we want to read but do not have, or to find out what the animal opposite us has devoured. And at home, we leave a colleague sitting in the living room, and return to find him standing there, without fail, sniffing at our books.
There is a moment, however, when we have accumulated so many books that they cross an invisible line, and what was once a sense of pride becomes a burden, because from now on space will always be a problem. The day the copy of The Shadow-Line came into my hands, I had been worrying about where I could possibly fit in a new set of shelves. From that moment on, it became an ever-present warning for me.
--- From The House of Paper
Carlos Marķa Domínguez
©2006, Harcourt