`I Can't Part with One'

I volunteered as a chaperone for my 5-year-old’s field trip to the zoo on Thursday, and vowed to myself all week I would not pack a book along with our lunches and water bottles. My resolve melted at the last minute and I grabbed Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters and shoved it into our backpack. I’m already reading Cynthia Ozick’s new story collection, Dictation, and the new edition of The English Poems of George Herbert, beautifully edited by Helen Wilcox, and The Unity of Philosophical Experience by Étienne Gilson, but I’m reviewing the Ozick and don’t want distractions while reading it, and the 740-page Herbert weighs too much, and a neo-Thomistic critique of Descartes doesn’t mix well with a busload of preschoolers, so I grabbed a book I already know and could read in discrete chunks, between the wailing bouts of tired children. Besides, Dr. Chekhov always makes excellent company.

He didn’t let me down. On the return trip, on a bus with 40 cranky kids and their even crankier teachers and chaperones, I took heart from these sentences, in a letter Chekhov wrote to Maria Kiselyova on Jan. 14, 1887:

“I accept that the writing profession will always be vulnerable to all kinds of rogues sneaking into its ranks, and therefore it will never be possible entirely to eliminate restraints and truncheons. But no matter how hard you cogitate you will never be able to invent a better policing system for literature than criticism and the individual conscience of the writer himself.”

Additional “affirmation” arrived when we returned home in the afternoon and discovered the ever-reliable Dave Lull had sent me a link to a Christopher Hitchens piece in City Journal. Hitchens, it seems, is a fellow bibliomania sufferer:

“Some kind friends argue for a cull, to create more space and to provide an incentive to organize. All right, but I can’t throw out a book that has been with me for any length of time and thus acquired sentimental value, or that has been written by a friend, or that has been signed or inscribed by its author. I also can’t part with one that might conceivably come in handy as a work of reference, however obscure.”