Books and More Books

From where I am sitting, I can spot nine bookcases. All but two are floor to ceiling. There are five more in another room. I haven’t seen the walls for over thirty-five years.

I like living with the cacophony of voices in the surround of Kazantzakis in discourse with Lawrence. Amichai with Trevor.  Joyce with Stevens. There are three wolves on my shelves who cannot agree on the spelling of their names: Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe and Tobias Wolff. Off in the corner is McLuhan trying to make sense of Wittgenstein. It has been a sort of an on-going fantasy dinner party.

However, maybe the time has come to provide them with a new homeland. What feels cozy to me smells musty to others. One friend says when he steps into the room it has the feel of a Parisian apartment. I hope he doesn’t mean Van Gogh’s garret. It’s that antiquarian bookstore whiff; perhaps a habitat for bookworms and assorted creatures who dwell between once-upon-a-time and happily ever after. Pages of books are, after all, organic substances.

Nine of them, I wrote. Peggy wrote a dozen. Together there are over sixty literary journals containing our work. Those, of course, are keepers. The truth is many volumes remain scrupulously unread by me. Peggy had bought books in the 1930s. When she was twenty-one, I was a semiliterate nine year-old.

Over the years I have given away hundreds but books seem to multiply. They have offspring. When I rediscover a poet, I find myself buying more of her work.

The dilemma remains: to liquidate now or posthumously, which is to say dump it all on my daughters and stepson while playing the harp in my afterlife. I invite anyone reading this to drop in and pluck certain authors from the shelves as long as you give them the love to which they have grown accustomed.