A Museum of Reading
Captions from a private and imaginary exhibition.
A bookshelf is a tangible autobiography: reading its titles, no matter how haphazardly arrayed, one follows the contours of one’s thought, learning, and fancy.
In “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth celebrates the genius of nature that inspired his youthful imagination:
Being a lesser and more housebound soul, the colors and forms that have always been for me “an appetite, a feeling and a love” are those of books. From as far back as I can remember, the very spines of books spoke to me from their place in line along the shelves with something of the promise, beauty, terrors, and wonder Wordsworth found among the lakes.
A personal library is a reader’s harvest: the seeds of education, experience, and intuition that the days plant in our plot of years take shape in the emblems of memory, learning, profession, and privacy that comprise a shelf of treasured volumes. For many of us, such a collection of books, be it large or small, represents the fruit of a lifetime’s cultivation, and we are constantly on the lookout for new specimens to add color and flavor to our imaginations.
A lifetime’s reading creates its own map of the world, a private cartography that charts both the armchair comforts and the far journeys of our minds. Even so, as we grow older, circumstances can conspire to limit our travels: literary lands once carefully, even lovingly, described by our attention become unintentionally forgotten, and countries filled with revelations remain, alas, closed books, unless we serendipitously wander into them again.
The spark that kindles romance between a reader and a book deserves to be fanned into magnificent flames by a Proustian imagination. For my part, I know of a great number of volumes that wormed their way into my library as if by magic, speaking to me from dusty piles of used books in some esperanto of bookishness that had nothing whatever to do with their subject. Hold me, they said, I am yours. From such mysterious infatuation, love may grow.
What forces we marshal when we read: experience, learning, taste and tradition, intuition and circumstance, memory and imagination, curiosity and convention — myriad resources meet between the lines whenever our eyes traverse a page. The magical practice that governs the country of the reader is an activity at once solitary and shared, a gateway to both the wider world and the welters and wonders of the inner life.
Every once in a while, you should take a reference book — a dictionary or an atlas, say, or a survey of history, music, literature, or art — down from the shelf and look things up. Nothing specific, and not because you need to elucidate a particular passage or answer a precise question (a search engine is more helpful there), but merely to wander among forests enchanted by all the things you don’t know. At once you can be humbled, invigorated, informed: the categories that constrain your thinking are stretched or exploded with embarrassing ease.
In his Autumn Journal, Louis MacNeice writes:
Futile though the effort may prove, “making a corner in life” is the unspoken ambition of all our labor, learning, and love. And we turn to books because, in them, “corners” — filled with company and solitude, adventure and serenity, romance and consolations, engagement and contemplation — come ready-made. In the quiet niche of a book our pleasures and regrets, yearnings and convictions can echo in a private and satisfying music.
Books can inspire the soul and educate the ambition, set a philosophical course or upset one’s assumptions, disturb one’s intellectual equilibrium or set one’s ideas to rights. But of all the gifts literature delivers, comfort is the one most often overlooked and undervalued. The solace of a reader’s solitude is like nothing else, and when it is enriched and elaborated by an author whose every sentence warms the page with generosity, intimacy, and emphatic understanding of the fears and fates that describe human experience — well, then solitude itself can glow with the pleasures of good company.
All literature is parenthesis: an interruption of the onrushing statement of the life lived, a statement which is never complete enough to do for long without the emendations, elaborations, amplifications, and qualifications of words. The covers of a book, like the upright curved lines that open and close parenthetical remarks, bracket the interpolations the imagination shapes within our life sentences. In the arms of such parentheses, the flesh escapes the ravages of time.
One book leads to another, and in describing the trail of our reading we inevitably trace constellations as eloquent and imaginative as those that grace the night sky. On the shelf or in the mind, the books we read never stop arranging themselves into patterns of meaning that illuminate the years or entertain the hours, and there is no volume whose value is not enhanced by the good company of bound companions.
