`My Spiritual Mainstay'

In “Escape from Civilization,” written in 1972 and included in The Collected Stories (1983), the narrator, who sounds very much like a younger incarnation of the author, Isaac Bashevis Singer, wishes to flee the Lower East Side of Manhattan to live in the Sea Gate section of Brooklyn. He’s a romantic young man, born in Bilgoray, Poland (Singer’s mother’s home town), who first fled to Warsaw, then to the United States. He is an aspiring writer, well known enough to have his picture in a Yiddish newspaper. He withdraws his savings from the bank ($78) and packs his cardboard suitcase with his belongings:

“I carried a few books to be my spiritual mainstay while away from civilization: the Bible, Spinoza’s Ethics, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, as well as a textbook with mathematical formulas. I was then an ardent Spinozist and, according to Spinoza, one can reach immortality only if one meditates upon adequate ideas, which means mathematics.”

I pay attention when people, real or fictional, distill their library to essentials, or play the old parlor game: Which books would you chose to take with you to a desert island? After all, what better reveals our values, our genuine priorities as opposed to social pretenses? While living in my college dormitory, I had two built-in shelves above my desk for books. I agonized over what to bring, what to leave home. In my sophomore year, I was certain the greatest novel ever written was The Wings of the Dove, but I owned the hefty two-volume New York Edition of James’ masterpiece. Bringing it meant slighting another title I couldn’t live without. I brought the James, however, even though I didn’t reread that year. I remember my relief when I found a diminutive hardback edition of Gulliver’s Travels (Oxford University Press, 1925 – I still have it), which could rest horizontally on top of other books, thus saving me precious shelf space.

I feel a kinship with Warshawsky, Singer’s narrator. He writes stories but carries no fiction on his comic odyssey to Brooklyn. Like so many Singer characters – I think of Dr. Nahum Fischelson, in “The Spinoza of Market Street” – Warshawsky is a high-minded sensualist, dwelling in the pure realm of Spinoza’s geometry while lusting after his newly divorced landlady. I share my love of books with Warshawsky, and my divided nature. As Dr. Fischelson says at the end of his story:

“Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.”