'Not Dead, But Sleeping'

My middle son is home from the Naval Academy for spring break, so we paid our customary visit to Kaboom Books on Saturday. The owner, John Dillman, was garrulous, as usual, so we had a good conversation. He described the eight-thousand-volume collection left by a woman who died last year. John He is evaluating the books for possible purchase, a time-consuming process. John divided the collection into roughly equal thirds: science, history, literature. Based on her books, John said, he wished he could have known her. I agreed. The volumes he doesn’t buy will go, he said, to “the catfish.” That is, the bottom-feeders. That is, Half-Price Books.     

Michael quickly found what he wanted: Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), which I haven’t read since it was published, and The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (1973) by Ralph Davis. I, too, was lucky. I bought a hardback edition of Glory, the last of Nabokov’s Russian novels (originally published in 1932) to be translated by him and his son Dmitri. I bought it back in 1971, when I was first devouring everything Nabokovian, but that original gaudy yellow volume is long gone.

I also found Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, an 1,168-page Random House edition published in 1937. The bookplate says the volume is from the library of Mr. and Mrs. Clyde L. Sears Jr. The only marks I find in the book are pencil underlings in “The Palimpsest of the Human Brain,” an essay first published in 1845 and later collected in Suspiria de Profundis. Here a passage Mr. or Mrs. Sears found worthy of note:

“Yes, reader, countless are the mysterious hand-writings of grief or joy which have inscribed themselves successively upon the palimpsest of your brain; and, like the annual leaves of aboriginal forests, or the undissolving snows on the Himalaya, or light falling upon light, the endless strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness. But by the hour of death, but by fever, but by the searchings of opium, all these can revive in strength. They are not dead, but sleeping.”

I first encountered the word palimpsest in 1971 in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939).