November 07, 2014

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I grew up with books as my companions. Ever since I was very young, I regarded some books as “serious works.” One couldn’t understand them immediately. I could access them only after I “grew up.” Father’s bookshelves held “serious works” on Western philosophy including books by Marx and Lenin. The most conspicuous were the blue-covered volumes of Capital and several sets of the history of Chinese classical literature. Father read from these books every day for years. He read most of them over and over again.

These books emitted a special smell that drew me into reverie. Whenever I was alone at home, I loved to place these books on the table one by one and pore over them carefully. I would smell them up close and touch them repeatedly. The bindings of all of these books were unadorned and exquisite, and the pages were filled with Father’s notes. At moments like this, the emotions in my young heart soared beyond admiration and rapture. At the time, I also began reading books, most of them light literature. I couldn’t classify them together with Father’s books. I hungered for books that could keep me enthralled temporarily. After I read them, I was finished with them. I had no desire to keep them. And I couldn’t have kept them, even if I’d wanted to, for most of the books were borrowed. In those days, who could afford to buy books?

Father’s books stood quietly on the bookshelves—always silently luring me toward them. Subconsciously, I sensed a very profound world in those books. It would cost a person a lifetime to enter that world in depth. Father read those books at night, every night, for years. His contemplative expression behind his spectacles was certainly not a pose. What reading stirred up in his mind was much different from what I felt when I read ordinary books. What was that? No one could tell me—not even Father himself. He said only, “In the future, you must read all of my books.” Did he mean that in the future I should do as he had done—sit in front of the same book for years, steeped in meditation? I didn’t understand.

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Hans Thoma
d. November 7, 1924

1.

Every day when I step out of my home to walk through the streets of my little Brooklyn neighborhood, I come upon boxes of books outside entranceways, on walls, and at the curb between garbage bags. Sometimes one box. Sometimes half a dozen. The houses with their stiff façades of brick and brownstone are steadily, inexorably disgorging their books. Coughing up volumes of D. H. Lawrence and Loire-region travel guides. Spewing Edith Wharton and Chinese cooking secrets. Vomiting old histories of Middle Eastern politics. The houses are terribly sick—bloated, congested, sclerotic—and they have undertaken a book cleanse. Some bright Sunday I expect to find the sidewalks buried in shiny paperbacks and tattered old hardcovers. Will I be able to wade through them? How deep will the book flood become?

Encountering a particularly huge regurgitation of literature, I glance up at the windows of the house from which it originated, wondering what happened inside to bring on this vast discharge. But the rooms are always still and dark. Always! Shouldn’t some great commotion signal that a crisis has come upon this residence? Shouldn’t, at the least, curtains be fluttering and cats be jumping for their lives? Are the inhabitants of these houses dead? Are the little unlit pyres of books before their doors announcements of mourning? How did I miss the moment when it was determined that the laying out of books before one’s house would indicate a corpse within?

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Adam Kuehl

Brief, Image, and Etymology: On Reading
Ryan Flaherty
conjunctions

To read is to be, for a time, text, but how? Say a text is allowed to enter the self and establish its distillment and pattern, why does this cause things to happen?

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Discomfiting, perhaps, perhaps illuminating or predatory, but nevertheless the text shakes out its tent in the skull. Between self and text, energy is indisputably born. Out of nothing, a genesis, a will that is more the text’s than the author’s will, more the text’s than the self’s.

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Lesser Ury
b. November 7, 1861