Books as Messengers

 I was talking to my sister about possessions the other day, as she was recounting to me some recent successes she has had with selling old books and articles of clothing online. "I think I'm embracing minimalism," she said. I remarked that that made sense for a disciple of Marie Kondo. It was a kind of evolution. Once one had purged one's personal possessions of those objects that did not bring joy, one could then move to the next stage, and purge oneself of the joy-bringing objects as well. 

My sister replied that this evolutionary process made more sense than might at first appear. "When you are paring down your possessions to only the ones that bring joy," she said, "one of the things you start to realize is just how few of them do actually bring you joy." She then introduced me to the Kondo precept that you should listen to the "messages" your objects send you. The idea being that every possession has a message for you, and you just have to hear what it is. 

This was easy for me to relate to. The majority of my possessions are books, and the majority of them unread books at that, and I can hear exactly the message they have for me every day. It is one of reproach. "You're so pretentious," say the fatter tomes who have hogged space on the shelf for years without being taken down. "You bought me, but you've never actually read me. And yet you show me off to people who stop by. You're such a faker and a fraud." 

The smaller books say the same thing, except more shrilly. "I'm barely, like, a hundred pages," says The Stranger or The Red Badge of Courage. "Most people would have already read me in high school! You could read me in an afternoon, and you still haven't done so, after all this time!" Other, bulkier tracts in unfamiliar fields—Linus Pauling's General Chemistry, say, or that Dover edition of Ordinary Differential Equations, just darkly chuckle. "Boy," they say, "that was a short-lived phase." 

Sometimes, I don't need the books themselves to voice these messages. A human will stop by and put them into actual words. When a friend or relative comes to visit, and surveys the scene, invariably I get the question: "Do you actually read all these books?" And I have to writhe and explain the complex truth: "yes, many of them. And others I plan to get to. And still others I can't now imagine reading but some day I will get a mysterious prompting that the time is ripe. For others, that will never happen. But I can't know which will be which."

There are of course ways for the connoisseur to turn the tables on the visiting friends and the reproachful volumes alike. Walter Benjamin, in his essay "Unpacking My Library," offers just such a method. He dismisses the "have you actually read all these books, sir?" question as that of a "philistine." He then goes on to quote Anatole France's response to the question (which Benjamin says is "standard"), when he was asked it: "Not one-tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?"

In other words, books can be embraced as pure object, pure possession, the mere acquisition of which is already a partial route into their enjoyment. One does not have to actually read them in order to claim the "right" to keep them on one's shelves. One is entitled to them as collectible, the same way one can buy a chair that is never sat upon. In that case, however, what joy do they contain? What is the "point" of a book if it has not been read? 

Benjamin lists several possible alternative uses in the course of his essay. For one, he describes the way in which a book carries a memory of the place—the particular strange city—in which it was purchased. Most of his volumes were acquired as a transient, he remarks, and: "How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!" (Zohn trans.)

I can easily relate to this. In my home right now, there is a pile from a used book store in Portland, Maine that happened to carry a long-sought volume by mostly-forgotten historian René Fülöp-Miller. There is another from the Shire Bookshop—an outstanding destination in Franklin, MA that occupied a floor of an old mill building, and which is now, alas, permanently closed (thus making the books found there years ago seem even more precious). 

There are the books acquired during work trips to Anchorage, AK and Spokane, WA—the list goes on. The enjoyment of such objects should be clear. One doesn't need to actually read a book called "Bear Attacks"—generally understood to be the definitive volume in the field—that one picked up in a two-story used bookstore in Spokane—to see why one needs to possess such a thing, and why one could never possibly get rid of it unless it was to gift it to a friend who would enjoy it even more (as I ultimately did.)

Not all of Benjamin's apologias for book collecting are this sentimental, however. He leaves space as well for the simple desire for possession in its own right. Benjamin acknowledges that this is somewhat hard to reconcile to his increasingly Marxist understanding of private property; he notes it is likely an old-fashioned attitude ("this passion is behind the times") that will not survive the coming deluge. But he is honest enough to admit it is real in him nonetheless. 

Whence comes this drive to acquire? Benjamin situates the answer where most of us would: the desire to own more and more things is most likely a desire for the indefinite amplification of the self. We want to enlarge our own presence in the world. When that is not possible directly, we will enlarge what belongs to us. 

This, surely, is the root of what Hazlitt refers to in his essay on wills as the "tendency to the heap"—the marked human drive to pile things up. Think of Flaubert's Hamilcar surveying the mysterious treasures he has hoarded in Carthage. Thinks of James Franco's character "Alien," in the Harmony Korine film Spring Breakers, as he stands on his bed and shows off his enormous collection of guns, ammo clips, knives, throwing stars, and other weapons. "Look at my shit!" he says, over and over again. "Look at my shit!"

Elias Canetti, with his dark view of human nature, would place the origin of this tendency—the love of the "pile"—in the ancient warrior's desire to surround himself with a pile of his defeated enemies. Perhaps our examples of Hamilcar and "Alien" already prove his point—the one's treasures are the spoils of war and conquest; the other's are the weapons he uses to kill. Canetti recognized, of course, that one can sublimate this drive into less harmful forms of acquisition (such as in the "increase pack" that desires only the increase of the annual harvest) but the origin of the drive for the pile, as one might call it, remains the same in all cases. 

There is something of this, perhaps, in my own love of book-collecting. Not so much that I imagine in some way I have taken the books from others; rather, that they are themselves trophies of my conquests in the life of the mind. Once a book has been read all the way through, marked up with pen, I keep it on my shelf as a reminder that it was a battle won. I met a large and difficult foe and bested it. Take that, Infinite Jest! And that, William Gaddis! I finished JR, just as I finished The Idiot—or Canetti himself, while we're on the subject.

But this brings us back around to where we started. Because if part of the drive to acquire books is to have them as trophies of difficult reading tasks set and accomplished, then any books that I haven't yet read can only continue to act as a reproach. "You haven't yet defeated me," they boast. That's what Gravity's Rainbow is saying to me right now. Or Being and Nothingness. They are like mighty Goliath still boasting on the field of battle. "I am undefeated! You were too weak to beat me!" they roar. 

Should I adopt the minimalistic principle, therefore, and simply discard these books, so I will no longer have to hear their taunts? Maybe I should strip my shelves bare of all the volumes I haven't read, leaving space only for my trophies. But no, I conclude: and this for a simple reason. I've discovered that I actually need those taunts, those reproaches, as a goad to read more. The only way I will ever make more trophies, the only way I'll ever tackle Gravity's Rainbow, is if it stays there mocking me each day until it happens. 

Case in point: this very blog post. By the time Friday afternoon rolled around this week, I had no idea what I wanted to read next. I surveyed the books in my room, and couldn't bring myself to open any of them. I knew that it would make the most sense for me to keep going with Walter Benjamin's Illuminations (in which the "Unpacking My Library" essays appears), since I had already started that the week before. But for some reason, I couldn't do it. The idea was distasteful. I had no drive. 

It therefore left my books behind and went out to acquire more books, assuming that the one I really wanted to read next would be there waiting for me. I went to a store and bought three books that I could imagine myself wanting to read sometime soon. Then I started the walk home. And as I did so, an idea began to form in my brain. An idea for this post, based as it was in large part upon the Walter Benjamin essay I had already read. Suddenly, I realized I had to finish Benjamin, and I did. 

My trip to the book store therefore did not actually provide me with the volume I wanted to read next. But it did provide the impetus to finish the one I had already started. I can only conclude that there is a certain ratio of unread-to-read books that is necessary to my reading life. My inner psychic economy requires the pressure of a certain number of taunts, a certain number of insults and boasts, from the unread books on my shelves, in order to force me to take up another volume and read. 

That pressure itself is uncomfortable, of course—like all forms of pressure. But as soon as it arrives, there is a way to relieve it. Start reading something, thus reducing the quantity of unread matter and partially rebalancing the ledger. This is the sense I make of Holbrook Jackson's advice in his Anatomy of Bibliomania (a long book I haven't finished yet, and which is therefore still in the "boasting/reproachful" category). He notes that there is only one cure for dangerous bibliomania, and it is a counterintuitive one. The only cure for it, he says, is to read.