`A Paradise of Great Spirits'

We move to Seattle in April and I have started the satisfying business of culling my library. I love my books and build my life around them and my family, but I also feel burdened by possessions of any sort. There’s nothing spiritual about this. I’m not renouncing anything. It’s purely neurotic, my reaction to the clutter, physical and otherwise, of my parents’ lives. I’m most comfortable in a spare, orderly space. Moving across the country is a pretext for moving closer to that spatial ideal.

Culling books is also important because I’ve never thought of my library as permanent or definitive. It has always been evolving, expanding and shrinking as my tastes and needs change. If a book has outlived its usefulness, I give it away. In this sense, my library is a reflection of who I am today but not necessarily who I’ve been in the past. The book I’ve owned the longest, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, dates from 1960, when I turned 8. The newest, A.J. Liebling: World War II Writings, I bought last Saturday.

Earlier I said my life is built around books and family. For that reason I’m not stricken with the more pathological strains of bibliomania. Books are conduits to life, not barriers. Without family, in solitude, I might disappear forever into books. I’ve known several such obsessive readers. One of the volumes I’m not likely to give away is Martin Buber’s Meetings: Autobiographical Fragments. Buber (1878-1965) was an Austrian-Israeli philosopher whose books, especially I and Thou and the collections of Hasidic tales, I devoured when young. The final piece in Meetings is “Books and Men,” which addresses the apparent dualism of the human and bookish worlds:

“If I had been asked in my early youth whether I preferred to have dealing only with men or only with books, my answer would certainly have been in favor of books. In later years this has become less and less the case. Not that I have had so much better experiences with men than with books; on the contrary, purely delightful books even now come my way more often than purely delightful men. But the many bad experiences with men have nourished the meadow of my life as the noblest book could not do, and the good experiences have made the earth into a garden for me. On the other hand, no book does more than remove me into a paradise of great spirits, where my innermost heart never forgets I cannot dwell long, nor even wish that I could do so. For (I must say this straight out in order to be understood) my innermost heart loves the world more than it loves the spirit.”

Here’s the conclusion of Buber’s fragment:

“I knew nothing of books when I came forth from the womb of my mother, and I shall die without books, with another human hand in my own. I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human being looking at me.”