A House without Books

All my life I have lived with and in books. 

[“Book” is an Old Eng­lish word (pre-1150 AD) and seems to be of Ger­man­ic origin.]

Books were in my par­ents’ house when I was born. I was encour­aged to have my own library when I was a kid. Before I could make a liv­ing as a writer, I was a librar­i­an. No sur­prise, books are in my home today.

I’m not sure why I keep books I have read (or intend to read) around me. They are on my walls, by my bed, and on my desk. Thus, the say­ing, “A house with­out books is like a body with­out a soul.” (Attrib­uted to Cicero, the Roman philoso­pher and states­man, 106 BCE-43 BCE) has great mean­ing for me.

Maybe it’s as sim­ple as “No fur­ni­ture so charm­ing as books.” (cred­it­ed to Syd­ney Smith — an Eng­lish writer, and Angli­can cler­ic.). Or is it because, as the poet Ezra Pound once said, “Lit­er­a­ture is news that stays news.”

It’s not just me. I recall an inter­view I once heard in which a writer (I no longer recall the name) was rem­i­nisc­ing about his father, an edu­ca­tor. It seems in lat­er years his father became blind. The son recalls that his father would wan­der into his library and touch his books. When he came upon one he remem­bered, he would stand there, hold the book in his hands and recall its contents.

I have only to glance at a favorite book on a shelf and I can remem­ber it (and the plea­sure) it gave me. “A read­er lives a thou­sand lives before he dies … The man who nev­er reads lives only one.” George R.R. Martin.

When I watch the night­ly news, there is often a back­drop of books behind the speak­er. It could be a fake image, but when I look at those books, they are often real. Some­times, dis­creet­ly dis­played, a copy of a book writ­ten by the per­son being inter­viewed. I find it inter­est­ing to know what the speak­er has read, is read­ing, and is writ­ing. In the same fash­ion, when I vis­it someone’s home, and there are books about, I con­sid­er the phrase, “He is like an open book.” Mer­ri­am-Web­ster has it that “The mean­ing of AN OPEN BOOK is a per­son or thing that is easy to learn about and understand.”

When I moved from the city to my coun­try home, I gave away some four thou­sand books to used book deal­ers. I’ve nev­er liked sell­ing them. On the oth­er side of things, I admit that I buy books because I enjoy seek­ing them out, hav­ing them, and read­ing them. And, oh yes, writ­ing them.

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a cul­ture. Just get peo­ple to stop read­ing them.” Ray Bradbury

When I am work­ing on a text, on a com­put­er, I often print what I have writ­ten because hav­ing the words on paper helps me bet­ter sense what I have done. Now and again, when print­ing, I even for­mat the pages so they tru­ly look like a book.

In short, as Jorge Luis Borges once said, “I have always imag­ined that Par­adise will be a kind of library.”