'That Particular Estate of Memory'

“The aesthetics of bound volumes is unique and exquisite; but there are more important things.”

For some of us, that’s tough wisdom to swallow. So many books, judged squarely as objects, are lovely to gaze at and hold. I love the heft of my 1934 Nonesuch Press edition of Hazlitt’s Selected Essays. Its physicality suggests something substantial, dense yet compact, worthy of respect. It’s not rare, certainly not valuable. Fine book design – good paper, elegant fonts – is always a pleasure, but I would be happy to read Hazlitt in a Bantam paperback with a cracked spine.

 

David Bentley Hart reminds us that a volume abstracted from its contents can tempt its owner into decadence, mere connoisseurship. The “more important things” for Hart are the book’s literary worth, the author’s words. Among his examples is Robert Louis Stevenson. Since childhood he had owned a 26-volume set of his work. Now that he’s lost it, he still enjoys Stevenson on his Kindle.  

 

In his essay “From a Vanished Library,” the Eastern Orthodox theologian and former owner of 20,000 volumes admits:  “I learned from the experience, in the end, that all vanity is vanity, all lust is lust, and all excess is excess, no matter what the objects of one’s desire.” Without going into details, Hart tells us he lost his library in 2014: “[A] natural catastrophe of an insidiously furtive and unanticipated kind overtook both me and my library, and ultimately (though in agonizingly protracted stages) the latter had to be liquidated.” Every serious reader’s nightmare.

 

Hart goes on to “indulge in a little nostalgia for that vanished library.” A friend had asked him for a reading list of some twenty-five volumes, which Hart turns into “an ideal way to take one last stroll around the grounds before locking the gates on that particular estate of memory.” All his choices are books he especially loves or reveres, though none is an “immediately obvious choice (because, really, no one needs to be told to read Homer or Dante or Shakespeare or Milton or Tolstoy or Proust or Rilke.)"

His list includes thirty titles, eleven from Asia or the Middle East, most of which I had never heard of before. I've read eleven on the list, including Walter Savage Landor’s wonderful Imaginary Conversations, which Hart describes as “brilliant, inventive, witty, and often even profound.” The beauty of such a list is the book lust it inspires. Now I want to read Georges Rodenbach’s 1890 novel Bruges-la-morte. I don’t think I’ve ever read a Belgian novel. Hart writes of it:

 

“The best and most hypnotic of the Belgian author’s works, and proof that there can be such a thing as great Flemish literature; a novel of pure atmosphere, physical and psychic: soft shadows, mutely gleaming canals, mist-gray buildings, grief, illusion, displaced desire, murder . . .”

 

Hart reminds us that the essay, for too long gasping on life supports, is a formless form that flourishes in pockets of eccentricity. It ought to be and often is the most unruly and personal, least predictable way to write. Matthew Walther has called Hart “our greatest living essayist.” That would be Joseph Epstein, but Hart is a contender.

[Also excellent: Hart’s “Nabokov’s Supernatural Secret.”]