Since I'm consumed with packing and coordinating my move, I can't seem to think about much else. And, as I start to pack my books in earnest, I've become fascinated with the small story that each book tells. Looking over my books, I see so many false dissertation paths, so many half-formed ideas, and so many half-finished books (will I ever finish Ulysses?). With this on my mind, I've decided to post an essay I wrote a few years ago. It is about my small, but meaningful to me, collection of signed books.
I wrote this while a graduate student, and a few of the sentences and some of the academicese make me cringe, but I offer it below with little editing.
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Letters to Past Selves
“Every
passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the
chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past
before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these
books.”
–Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”
–Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”
“the better part of our
memories exists outside us”
–Marcel Proust, In Search of
Lost Time
Each book sitting on my shelf carries
the memory of former selves and of earlier times. A set of books in my collection that is
particularly loaded with memories for me include those signed by another
person, either the author or a previous owner.
The most recent book that
has been signed is Snow by Orhan
Pamuk. I bought it right before departing
on a cruise to the Caribbean with my wife’s family. I must admit that my decision making process
for selecting this did rest greatly on the juxtaposition of Pamuk’s snowy Kars
with the sunny Caribbean. And so now,
whenever I consider this book, I experience a Wordsworth-like “spot of time”—a
memory of long days unfolding upon the deck of a ship, in the open air, as I
would occasionally glance away from my book to contemplate the blue-green
clarity of the water. But when this book
found its way into the hands of its author, it gained a new temporality. I had the great fortune of meeting Pamuk, and
as one often does in such a situation, I asked him to sign his book. Beneath his signature he placed the date,
inscribing both himself and that moment upon my book. His signature functions as a trace, and as
such, gives voice to heterogeneous temporalities. It is a mark of the past, recalling a
particular moment in time. And yet, it
is present to me. I can run my fingers
over the ink. Paul Ricoeur would call this
the inscription of lived time upon calendar time.
The twin to this book is my signed
copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic
Verses. Both books are by
international authors, and both writers are concerned with the meeting of East
and West. But an important difference
between them is that Rushdie signed my copy of his book in my absence. While I sat in Graham Chapel at Washington University, listening to
Rushdie talk about his work and his life, my grandfather was in the hospital
gravely ill. The time of the
intellectual, marked by books and lectures, was interrupted by the time of
loss, and ultimately, of mourning. When
Rushdie was signing my book at the behest of a friend the next day, I was on
the road, traveling home to attend the funeral of my grandfather. Having recently read Jacques Derrida’s
writings on the deaths of friends, collected in a volume called The Work of Mourning, I wish that I had
made a copy of my eulogy rather than delivering it from memory. I cannot now recall much about it.
The memory of my grandfather,
linked forever with the signing of Rushdie’s book, leads me to make a
connection between one signed book and another, between The Satanic Verses and a book that my grandfather owned. On the fourth of July in 1997—it was the
summer before my Junior year of college—my grandfather loaned me a book by John
B. Noss titled Man’s Religions. I can only dimly remember the conversation
that led to his loaning me the book. In
a moment of humor appropriate to my grandfather, he signed his name, date, and
address (apparently to remind me where he lived), along with a note that it was
being lent to me, on the inside cover.
His inscription was a teasing reminder that I had occasionally
“forgotten” to return books to him. I
never did return it to him, and now, I consider it part of my collection. Although it is a good book on comparative
religions, I keep it mostly for the inscription left by my grandfather. But the book may conceal further
temporalities. Why did my grandfather
buy the book? Originally published in
1949, this particular copy is the third edition of 1957, when he would have
been in his late twenties. Sometime in
the 1980’s, he privately had a bar
mitzvah, which he should have had decades before. There is a story there that is not available
to me, and perhaps this book plays a part, but I cannot ask him now.
Memories of my grandfather conjure
a third book, bringing me further back in time.
When I was very young, I went to visit him in the hospital—an option not
open to me when he passed way. He was
recuperating from bypass surgery, and during that time my ever-garrulous
grandfather had gotten to know a fellow patient. As grandparents often do, he told her about
me at great length. And for some reason,
she felt compelled to give me a gift during one of my visits, and this gift was
the first novel that I remember
owning. It was The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.
Here I experience a double loss.
Not only is this book missing, but also my memory of receiving it lies
at the vanishing point of recollection.
Only with great effort can I recall anything more than the fact that
this event happened. With some sadness,
I do remember that I did not read The
Hobbit until many years later. At
that time, I was not much of a reader.
My career as a reader did, however, begin with the genre which Tolkien
inspired—fantasy. And though I rarely
read fantasy fiction now, the memory of this book still looms as a curious
happenstance because I am currently training to be a medievalist, Tolkien’s own
academic field.
My memories link back along the
chain of the signature, and I think about another pair of signed books that I
own, by two fantasy authors: Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan. These books recall the larger series of books
that the authors wrote many years ago.
Looking at them now, I am arrested by a certain set of memories. They
are almost like Proust’s madeleine, overwhelming me with memories, sensations,
smells. They bring me to a period of my
life when reading acted as a life preserver in the face of one of time’s
truths: illness. As an adolescent, I
spent a significant amount of time in the hospital. During my stays, I spent all of my free time
reading, particularly the fantasy novels of Terry Brooks. (I cannot think of one of his books now with
out smelling the singular odor of the hospital—disinfectant.) I am also reminded of Ricoeur’s reading of
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in volume 2 of Time and Narrative,
where monumental time (manifested as official time, or clock time) intersected
with the private times of the characters Clarissa and Septimus. My stay in the hospital was marked by a
similar dual apprehension of time.
Hospital time is regular, and largely impersonal. Have your vitals checked at this time;
receive your breathing treatment at this time; and take your medication at
another. The days would roll on, marked
by the periodic and regular reminder of mortality and sickness. The rest of the time, however, was one long
unfolding of solitude. During that
private time, reading these fantasy books gave me a sense of “transport” in the
way that Longinus defined it. My love of
books, which has ultimately led me to seek a doctorate, is anchored in that
experience.
While these books harbor memories
of many people and places, my collection also testifies to a Proustian
succession of different selves. The
person that bought and experienced them is, to varying degrees, a stranger to
me now. And even though I have only
recently developed a vocabulary for discussing time, all of those previous
selves have always been keenly aware of both its passing and the problems
created in its wake. But in trying to
organize my collection under the aegis of time I must echo a sentiment of
Walter Benjamin’s in “Unpacking My Library,” and acknowledge that “[t]his or
any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which
surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions.”
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