Reading ‘Packing My Library’ While Packing My Library

After sixteen years we are breaking camp in Connecticut and moving to the Roxborough section of Philadelphia. This will be an important change, although my life beyond moving so far is remaining opaque to me. I'm not sure what it will bring.

Moving after so long a time—by far the longest we have ever lived in one house anywhere—has meant that stuff built up. Much of it had to go. We're downsizing so some decisions were difficult, some timely, some frankly welcome: far less yard care, snow shoveling (but parking in the street, alas). Difficult: giving away the piano. Timely: drastically thinning the books while maintaining my own sense of identity, history, and intentions for the future.

While weeding the collections, I turned up Alberto Manguel's Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions, a book remarkably timely to my condition. Although Manguel is a very different person, with a very different library (now in Lisbon), I recognize the dilemma. Books are friends, and friends form some level of a person's self-definition, my identity. Book on Anglican theology and spirituality (once a greater interest of mine than now): gone. I am unlikely to read those. Books about American history and history of religion went to SHU: who knows whether they will use or retain any of them. (They did apparently retain my copy of America's God by Mark Noll.) Various other miscellany: gone (to Better World Books)

Packing one's books is a peculiar exercise: suddenly what matters most is a book's dimensions and relative physical weight. The contents of the boxes can be most heterogenous and I imagine the books speaking to each other, and hardly at all about me --they have so many more interesting insights to exchange.

Collecting books--even modestly--is to try to assert some control over the unbearable: forgetting, disregarding, mocking, patronizing—all the sniggers of American culture so anti-intellectual that it welcomes conspiracy theories and all manner of paranoid hatreds. Collecting books is somehow a stay against loss, a bricolage of hope in a world of shrinking and ever-darkening horizons. Manguel identifies "shall these stones live?" as a (sic) "Samarian" question (Samaritan question? Sumerian question?). I relate it rather to Ezekiel: shall these bones live? Collecting books is an invitation to the spirit, the wind that will join book to book, joint to joint, bone to bone.

Packing a Library is a hedge against loss, but also a pledge to rediscover when unpacking: in a new setting, new shelving, with new neighbors (both human, and neighboring books on the shelves). It is to assert some kind of strength in an opaque future, a virtue of persistence and commitment to wisdom.

In one of my favorite illustrations: books fall open, you fall in. Packing a library is a promise to fall into the future. With those voices, those presences, those memories shored against my ruin, in Eliot's phrase. To remember to walk with Tiresias, or to borrow the voice of Charles Ryder (Evelyn Waugh):

The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year, generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. . . .

Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame--a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.