'Loved Old Things'

Last week I illustrated a post with a photograph taken by my youngest son of the Chekhov shelf in my library. A reader observes that I must be a very “neat and organized” person. I’m not. I admire neatness and organization, and find nothing to admire in their opposites, but I’m plagued by the sense that entropy is always getting the better of me. I find wisdom in the lines Borges tucks neatly within parentheses:

“(To arrange a Library is to practice,

in a quiet and modest way,

the art of criticism.)”

The shutdown is a good time to organize the messes on my shelves. Some, I admit, are satisfyingly arranged – perhaps an illustration of “the art of criticism,” as described by Borges. The Chekhov shelf is pristine. Here are the contents of another, less tidy shelf: Steven Millhauser, Hubert Butler, Shakespeare critic David P. Gontar, Robert Burton, Nirad Chaudhuri, Terry Teachout and Bill Barich. The only thing that orders such a hodgepodge is the pleasure I take in these writers. Call me neurotic but that’s not good enough.

The Borges poem is “June, 1968” (trans. Hoyt Rogers; ed. Alexander Coleman, Selected Poems, 1999). It hinges on the quintessentially Borgesian irony that Borges, director of Argentina’s National Library from 1955 to 1973, and author of “The Library of Babel,” was blind. His poem concludes:

“[I]n the afternoon that might be gold

he smiles at his curious fate

and feels that peculiar happiness

which comes from loved old things.”