'All Sit in Sullen Silence and Await'

My middle son has a friend, a fellow Marine, who had questions about Russian literature. He asked about Andrei Platonov and Leonid Andreyev. I’ve never read the latter but told him what little I knew about the former. I recommended Vasily Grossman, and he said he intends to read Stalingrad. Previously, he had suggested Michael read The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, one of my favorite novels. This Marine, whom I have never met, has an interest in colonial Algeria and I was able to recommend Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (1977), which he subsequently read. 

This is one of the ancillary pleasures of reading good books. Suggestions, of course, are made to be ignored but occasionally one takes hold and one’s pleasure is doubled. I don’t remember anyone recommending a book to me when I was young. That probably contributed to me becoming a semi-secretive reader. I assumed no one was interested in the books I loved. That began to change at the university when I met a few students and faculty members who shared my enthusiasm. There’s an informal underground out there of adventurous readers, those who eschew bestsellers and often contemporary books and indulge in our inheritance.

 

D.A. Cooper is a poet who, I’m told, lives here in Houston. This is his poem, “To Read”:

 

“There are so many books to read; they fill

the shelves of libraries and stores across

the world, as well as every empty space

inside my house. The stacks grow year by year;

they rise like zombie corpses on my desk,

my couch, and all across the floor. Each begs

to sink its dusty claws into my brain.

I crack their spines, flip through their crumbling pages,

and try to pick which ones I’ll give new life.

There are too many books to read. I see

those volumes and I know I’ll never have

the time I need to finish even just

the ones I own. They cry out from my shelves—

collected poems and stories of the dead—

entreating me to resurrect their souls.

And that is just the famous literature.

Great forests have been razed so I could buy

large piles of science fiction, fantasy,

detective novels, politics, and physics.

Selections of the best known -ologies,

a sampling of the most loved -ographies,

and sprinkles of my favorite -osophies,

all sit in sullen silence and await

the hoped for yet unlikely future date

when I will find the time I need to read.”

 

Cooper describes an anxiety I once suffered from: too many books looming over my head. How would I ever be able to read all of them? With time, I turned that around. Now it’s reassuring to know such bounty awaits me. Even better, I know precisely which books I will soon reread.