On the same day I removed all the books from one of the bookcases, dusted the shelves and reorganized the volumes, one of our cats leaped into an open cupboard in the kitchen. One of the four pegs supporting the middle shelf was missing and Trane’s weight tipped it enough so a large glass bowl and a can of corn starch, among other things, fell on the counter and floor with a crash. The bowl shattered and a cloud of white powder settled on everything, including hundreds of slivers of glass. The cats hid under the bed for the rest of the day, we spent an hour cleaning up the mess and I pondered the wonders of shelving. So did Tom Disch in “The Shelf” (Poetry, June 1996):
“This, not
the wheel or the wedge or the pulley,
was the
first machine, a system for making things stay
put instead
of, as they do in nature, rolling downhill
or wobbling
about and spilling arrowheads all over the cave.
It’s flat,
but not as a floor is flat, from being walked on;
it’s
intentionally flat, like the bottom of the bowl
it’s there
to support. Gravity, inertia, and friction
join forces
to place flower pots and books
within easy
reach and keep them there.
Imagine the
life of primitive woman,
before there
were shelves, having to bend over
or hunker
down any time she needed the least thing.
Things,
indeed, could not be said to have existed
in the times
before shelves, for there was nowhere
things could
go. Now we take our shelves for granted,
as we do
superhighways and jumbo jets; we do not consider
how most of
the furniture that surrounds us,
the chests-of-drawers,
the desks, the whatnots,
are just
extensions of that original brainstorm,
all of them
busy at their secret work
of
maintaining a stable and orderly civilization.”
One of the
advantages of working for an engineering school is being reminded daily of what
we owe our forebears. On our own, starting from scratch, most of us are
hopeless. Consider, as Disch does, the first person in human history to make a shelf. It’s one
of those mundane things, like shoes, keys and tin cans, that make it possible
for civilizations to thrive. The late Henry Petroski was a civil engineer who made
a career of writing about such things as pencils, toothpicks and paperclips. In
his 1999 volume, The Book on the
Bookshelf, Petroski writes:
“The
bookshelf, like the book, has become an integral part of civilization, as we
know it, its presence in a home practically defining what it means to be
civilized, educated, and refined [!].”
1 comment:
And now book shelves are disappearing almost as fast as the books they used to hold. On the other hand, kitchen cabinets and so forth are holding steady, even filling up given the cost of eating out. But overall, the contemporary urban studio apartment -- what Auden described as "the small workmanlike flat" in the 1930s is chiefly remarkable for everything that's not in it, book shelves included. White walls, bare floors, and a fanatical cleanliness symbolized by the latest model vacuum cleaner, a streamlined marvel often displayed like a sculpture -- a functional Brancusi -- rather than hidden in a closet.
Post a Comment