`A Disparate Library'

A line from an essay by Adam Zagajewski, “Vacation’s End,” published in A Defense of Ardor, has rekindled an old anxiety: “Trips remind us that we read too much, that rich fields of reality spread beyond the library.” Zagajewski is careful in his phrasing. He does not say that books and libraries represent unreality, as opposed to the great, inarguably real “out there.” He says they are but one part of reality, though obviously an important part coming from so book-intoxicated a man. But, what is “too much” reading? Is a life dedicated to books no less real, no more foolish or irresponsible, than a life spent woodworking, praying or making lots of money?

The question nags: What have I missed by spending so much of my life between the covers of books? Asking it assumes I have misspent, if not actually wasted, my time. What would I have chosen to do instead? Watch television? Hunt deer? Shoot baskets? Collect stamps? Attend NASCAR races? Run for public office? All of that is ridiculous and none of it interests me. It seems dull and ungrateful, a waste of the time given me. I was born with an unlikely inclination, coming as I did from a family that read little and placed no value on scholarship, learning or even speaking articulately. My father distrusted books, even feared them. When he asked my best college friend what he was studying, Scott said he was a history major, and my father responded, “I don’t study history. I make it.” He was not a humorous man, but a man frightened in ways he could not understand.

After our father’s death, my brother deduced from old records that he had never graduated from high school. He read the newspaper, magazines, a few history books – World War II (in which he fought), the American West. How could he have understood a teenage aesthete who read Flaubert and George Santayana? The anxiety Zagajewski’s observation sparks in me is part of my inheritance from my father, as surely as my voice and the shape of my head.

My brother and I were lucky. We have always proceeded by the law of contraries: Told to do something, we go out of our way to do the opposite. Ken is a musician who can sight-read and play almost any instrument. He can draw, paint and even put up Sheetrock. Professionally, he’s been a picture framer for more than 30 years. He knows more about Durer than I will ever want to know. Last weekend, he went to a library book sale in suburban Cleveland and bought the The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians for $2, plus a book about Venice. In this sense at least, though probably in no other, my brother and I are Emersonians. We have followed our own gifts and passions, and thus created our own eccentric and very American lives.

Late in life Jorge Luis Borges wrote, “Over time, one’s memory forms a disparate library, made of books or pages whose reading was a pleasure and which one would like to share.” My memory is amply stocked. Its contents are drawn from mundane, day-to-day existence and from movies, television, music and most of all books. Some of the images I carry around are of uncertain parentage: Novel? Painting? Dream? Real life? Besides the pleasure Borges mentions, I have a densely populated mental landscape, more like Mexico City than rural Utah. On most occasions, I enjoy my company. I have no good excuse for being bored.

Happy birthday, Ken.