'Maintaining a Stable and Orderly Civilization'

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 [!].”