A Pilgrim’s Digression

I began this post Thanksgiving Day, but found no time to finish it. We had a busy week, with my wife’s family visiting from Wednesday through Sunday, and plenty of cooking, eating, going to the movies, playing cards, and decorating for Christmas to keep us fully occupied. It was a good holiday.

The only real negativity that crept into the holiday occurred early on, before the family arrived. I was feeling extremely grouchy at the intensity of my wife’s preparations. Tuesday and Wednesday, I especially felt harried and nagged, and unable to find even a half-hour to myself. I remember Thursday morning, I got up early thinking that no one else would be awake and I could have maybe an hour to myself to play World of Warcraft. I made the coffee and then took the dog out for a pee, and by the time I came back in Lynn was up, preparing the turkey and asking for my help.

In retrospect, I had no right to be resentful, though. It was a good Thanksgiving, and it was good because my wife and her sister made it a good one. I can be intensely anti-social, even misanthropic, not to mention plain old lazy…and then I act as if it is other people’s fault when I am not enjoying myself.

To capture some of what I wrote about originally on Thanksgiving Day, my brother-in-law brought down from Pittsburgh about twelve crates of books that had been stored in my mother-in-law’s attic since I graduated college in 1998. Ten years. I had forgotten I had many of these books. I had particularly forgotten that I once owned so many of the Library of America Editions. I purchased my first one, the writings of Frederick Douglass, back in the fall of 1994 when I was an undergraduate. I don’t believe the book is in print any longer, or at least it is not listed in the LoA online catalog. The reason I remember it so clearly is that it was a considerable expense for me. I spent a lot of money I didn’t have on books I didn’t need, back in those days.

I remember paying $35.00 for a late nineteenth century Cambridge Edition of Shelley’s poetry, purchased from the same book store in Morgantown, West Virginia. Today, I spend $35.00 to put gas in my car per week, but in the mid-nineties, that was a lot of money for me. I sold plasma for book money, in those days; and believe me, considering my fear of needles that was quite a sacrifice.

I spent some time Thanksgiving Day and the days following looking through the crates of books that even now sit stacked in my office, and remembering them and remembering myself ten years ago. God, I must have really loved books.

I can still remember where the books were placed on my bookshelves in my college apartment. In those days, I could spend an afternoon just looking at the books on the shelves and thinking about them, or taking one down and reading a little, putting it back and choosing another.

Last Monday, Lynn and I watched a film called The Stone Reader, about the film maker’s search for a writer named Dow Mossman, who wrote one good book in 1972 and then simply stopped writing. The film maker, Mark Moskowitz, is a devoted reader, and in watching him lovingly browsing his own books I remembered a little bit about myself. I can remember being that excited about books.

Even the people Moskowitz interviews seem a little taken aback at his excitement. In a way, it is an excitement that only an amateur could possess. A professor or a literary critic learns to look at literature coldly, like the scientist or doctor who learns to dissociate himself from the specimen he is dissecting. Moskowitz can’t help but grin when looking at the books he loves.

The literary people he interviews in trying to understand Mossman’s decades long writer’s block all seem dried up, used up. They mumble in a kind of ivy-league slurry of effete nonsense, or else pronounce words in such a precise, snobbish way that one wonders if they actually read or if they simply scan a book the way a computer might take it in, turning the words into so many jargon-laden ones and zeros spat out for consumption by other shriveled literary critical machines.

Or to put things in Hemingway-like terminology, one wonders if they have genitals or just a Ken-doll like bump where their cock and balls ought to be.

My books. I felt like I was visited by an old, dear friend I had written off as a figment of my forgotten past. And what’s more, it was like we never parted.

Here was that collection of short stories by Dorothy Parker. Her stories are like cocktails, a quick hit of gin and vermouth, and I drank one straight before Thanksgiving dinner.

Three books by Tim O’Brien. I read The Things They Carried years ago, and it occurred to me, looking at that book again, that it would be wise to read it again in our present war-like circumstances.

Several books by Paul Auster, including a graphic novel adaptation of City of Glass. I had to read Auster for a class in Post-Modernism I took as a graduate student.

So many books. Twelve crates of them, nearly all of them with specific memories connected to them. In one, a Penguin edition of classic Japanese Haiku, I even found a post-it with directions to my then-girlfriend-now-my-wife’s house in Pittsburgh. Apparently, these were the directions she gave me the first time I drove up there, and I had saved them by sticking the post-it in a book. Maybe it was the book I took with me to read.

These crates of books were literally like a time capsule, most particularly because they seemed to remind me of who I used to be. I spent a long time alone in my office looking at them, while my wife and her sister cooked, and my brother-in-law dozed in a chair, and the kids played with the dog. Eventually, Lynn came in and asked me to join everyone else. I was being anti-social, she said. It was hard to tear myself away, though, and throughout the week I kept going back, moving the crates around and shifting the books and looking at them.

God, I had forgotten I had this copy of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. The book was almost impossible to find back in the mid-nineties, before the advent of Internet bookstores. Somewhere, somehow, I had picked up a copy.

Oh, I remember where I got it. It was during one of those early trips to Pittsburgh. I went to a bookstore down on Carson Street in the South Side and felt like I got a treasure cheap because it was only $3.00. Such a hard to find book, and I got it for a few bucks.

I remember. I remember.