Desert Libraries

Friday, December 3rd, 2019. Diluted with time and change, I remember nothing about that day except “Packing My Father-in-Law’s Library”. I was snatching a brief break from work when I caught sight of something unusual on my recommended reading list:

‘We strangely persist in pretending that books are not ruins’ — Essay by English Critic James Wood.

I clicked inside and read it. What could I have done? Could I have ignored such a challenge? We strangely persist in pretending that books are not ruins. It was as if someone had thrown a hefty, thousand-page anthology in my face. If books are ruins, then what is my life?

The essay began innocuously enough, with Wood introducing his father-in-law François-Michel Messud, a French immigrant who arrived in the U.S. in the early 1950s as a Fulbright Scholar. I found Wood’s picture of Messud fascinating but difficult to visualize. Messud, according to his son-in-law, was a businessman; yet he was a man of scholarly tastes and instincts; and yet, he had little tolerance for literature, music, or philosophy.

In childhood my mind had taught itself to organize ideas into boxes and bullet points, with little concern for either the capriciousness or poetry of reality. At the time I stumbled across this essay, I still clung to the habit of mechanically categorizing even the most elusive concepts and stubbornly resisting ambiguity. I could not, would not, understand the psyche of Messud as described by his son-in-law — the psyche of a businessman who has a penchant for scholarly pursuits but no interest in literature or philosophy. What was I to make of that? “What interested him were societies, tribes, roots, exile, journeys, languages.” So he was a historian by interest, perhaps an anthropologist. But the image of Messud the querulous ‘businessman-anthropologist’ can hardly be imposed on Messud the meticulous bibliophile, who sorted and re-sorted his books with determined pride.

And that was not the only reason I took a dislike to the essay. I was appalled by “how quickly [Wood] became alienated” from “the rather stupid materiality” of Messud’s books. The “avariciousness” of book-collecting, said Wood, “resembled, in death, any other kind of avariciousness for objects.” He called books “unkillable, inert”; he called Messud’s library a “word-wreathed, untranslatable mausoleum”. It was enough to throw me into confusion. Books, I said aloud, are not “unkillable, inert”; they are immortal and full of vigor; the dust of time does not settle on them. Libraries are not “untranslatable mausoleums”; they are written in a universal language, the currency that allows all rivers of knowledge to flow into each other and merge into one collective consciousness. James Wood dissented from this consciousness. I decided that this was enough reason to dismiss his essay and forget about the unpleasant half-hour he had given me.

A few years later, as I scrolled through my reading history, “Packing My Father-in-Law’s Library” caught my attention again, though in a different way. In 2019 I had not the remotest idea who James Wood was, or the remotest interest to learn anything about him, but now his name carried meaning.

We are all of us at the passive, receiving end of a stream of information life throws at us, a stream that is alternatively bewildering and instructive. I often find myself in this latter situation while browsing through bookstore catalogs. Sometimes I look through them with a purpose; but I always find it more rewarding when I browse at random, letting my eyes and my hands take me where they will. It was on one of these occasions, a month ago, that I stumbled upon a book titled How Fiction Works, written by one James Wood. For all I knew, it was the first time I had ever seen the name.

I ordered the book. I remember opening the package and looking at it with slight surprise; it was only the size of my hand—smaller than I imagined, but in an oddly endearing way, with its red cover, vintage font, and deckle edge. I sat it on my shelf and thought no more of it, but the reappearance of Wood’s essay knocked on a long-forgotten door and warned me that I had come full circle back to my (one-sided) confrontation with him over a year ago and that my inner struggle with building a personal library (to buy, or not to buy?) probably stemmed from that essay. I was not going to run away, however, and shake my fists at him from a distance; I had bought his book with an unprejudiced mind, which meant that to some extent, I was willing to hear what he had to say.

A re-read left me both perplexed and relieved. The essay that I had once dismissed was a distortion of the real one. In 2019, I did not exactly construct Wood’s claims for him, but neither did I read them in the context in which they were meant to be read. Wood’s central claim—or at least one of his more important claims—was that a personal library is meaningless to the extent that it fails to shed light on its owner, and imposes itself on the owner’s children as an unwanted legacy—intellectual legacy at best, since no one harbors any illusions as to how materially worthless books are once they leave the bookstore. And when ‘intellectual’ legacy appears in the form of Messud’s long, shining, comprehensive rows of books on Burma, one instinctively exclaims, like Catullus, Doctis, Iuppiter, et laboriosis! Doctis, yes; laboriosis, quite; but ultimately—useless. There is no intellectual value to, say, stocking twenty-odd books on Burma on your shelf, unless it’s for a dissertation (which is still a pretty poor reason these days). Wood states the obvious by saying that “no one has read one’s entire library”; in fact, one can go further to claim that “no one has read one’s entire collection of books on a subject.” That is why one ‘stocks’ twenty-odd books on Burma; one never reads them.

My father is something of a bibliophile, and since I am, inevitably, the family librarian, I know better than he does how many books he has on Sino-American relations or history: more than enough, and much, much more than necessary. I also know that there is a wall of boxes somewhere in the basement that belongs to him but has remained unopened for decades—the old books, old periodicals, old magazines, older than me, older than our house or anything in it.

“I remember hearing about an accident that befell the scholar and critic Frank Kermode a few years ago. He was moving house and had put all his most precious books (his fiction, his poetry, signed first editions, and the like) in boxes, on the street. The binmen came by and mistakenly took the boxes, leaving Kermode with a great deal of contemporary literary theory. The story once seemed horrifying to me, and now seems almost wonderful. To be abruptly lightened like that, so that one’s descendants might not be lingeringly burdened!”

The story did seem horrifying at the time (it brought to mind nightmares of the house catching on fire and my own insignificant library crumbling into ashes), but now, reading it with my father’s much larger and heftier library in mind—just as Wood wrote it with his father-in-law’s library in mind—it does seem almost wonderful. Wood’s horror turned into relief because he had passed under the shadow of Messud’s library; his contemplations naturally led him to “resolve not to leave behind such burdens for my children after my death”. Perhaps I, too, standing under the shadow of my father’s library, should take pity on whatever children I may have, or whatever friend unfortunate enough to be bequeathed my books.

Years ago, when we prepared to move, my mother and I took the opportunity to rid my father of a very small portion of his library—chiefly the older, more outdated self-help books, buried deep in the recesses of the shelves and yellowed by time and dust; or books that were so blatantly useless and devoid of intellectual value that we doubted if my father was ever aware of their existence in the first place. But what we threw out was nothing compared to what we boxed up and eventually dumped onto the shelves in the study of our new house—I say ‘dumped’, because there was no attention was paid to order or beauty. Everyone was too tired to care about them; my mother mumbled something about arranging them later, but understandably, she never did.

No one touched the ‘library’ for years. I was the only one who took a book or two from it occasionally for reference (I usually have all the books I need upstairs). In late 2020, we still hoped that one day, one of us would perhaps be bored or motivated enough to categorize the books and put each back into its proper place; but after a few months, it became clear that the books would sit where they are until the day when we have to move again. No one even mentioned the ‘library’; for all intents and purposes, it did not exist.

“The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place.”

Eventually, however, even this ‘visitable place’ is rendered unvisitable by disorder and neglect. I remember what my parents occasionally said in answer to a remark or question of mine: ‘There’s a book about that in the house.’ Yes, but where? ‘Oh, somewhere downstairs. Don’t ask me.’ 

What becomes of “visitable place(s)” when their owners no longer wish to visit them? The quickest way to ruin a house is to abandon it, to surrender it to nature and marauding hands; so it is with books and libraries. The ‘library’ that my parents, especially my father, had built up so painstakingly over the years gradually metamorphosed into meaningless heaps of paper, dust, and color on the shelves—literally meaningless because the study was converted into a bedroom for my grandfather and his nurse—one a semi-conscious receptacle of Alzheimer’s disease, the another an uneducated, illiterate woman. He doesn’t know that there are at least a thousand books in his room and that in the distant past, he was a reader himself; she had never been a reader and treated the overloaded shelves as one treats a junk drawer: what little space left by the books was occupied by plastic bags, bottles of medicine, nursing gear, careless paraphernalia.

Books exist for those who live lives; neither of them has a life. Books are no more to them than an appendage of the wall. Books only bear meaning in relation to those who read them; a library in the middle of a desert, even if it houses and preserves the best that mankind has to offer, does not exist at all.

My family was laid down by Covid in 2022. During the period of recovery, I had ample reason to waste my time wandering about the house, sporting an aching head and heavy-lidded eyes. On one of these occasions, I found myself in the study. It was empty; my grandfather and his nurse were sitting in the hall. I stood before the shelves and glanced idly through a row of titles: The Winds of War, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Augustine of Hippo, Poems of W. B. Yeats, Steve Jobs, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, Sophie’s World, Decision Point, Emile, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, The World Crisis, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Voices from Chernobyl…

It bothered me that such different books should sit next to each other on the shelf. It bothered me still more that my parents had all but forgotten about them. It bothered me that when I took down an exquisite white hardcover version of The Plague, my fingers were smeared with gray. It bothered me that—but I needn’t go on.

The next morning I set about the long-delayed project of sorting the library. My mother wondered if I had regained enough of my strength to haul books around the room, but was grateful that the prediction—that the books would be as disordered on the day we move out as on the day we moved in—would not come true after all.

We had overestimated the scale of the project. It only took three and a half hours to sort the books into rough categories. Ideally, I should have sorted them into subcategories as well, but that would have required a basic knowledge of each individual book, which would probably triple the workload. In any case, it wasn’t as if my family would suddenly start using the library once it was subcategorized; I did not expect it, and it did not happen.

But I could not have done Wood’s essay justice if I had not spent time sorting the books. Of course, I have spent I don’t know how many hours in my own library, but there is a difference between sorting one’s own books and sorting one’s father’s. I should have understood long ago that even when two books are identical, the book that one has handpicked is much more valuable than its counterpart. There is knowledge, the inherent value, but more significantly, it is knowledge selected and claimed by the owner. I never order a book without first researching it; the research-and-selection process adds to the value I attach to my books, as, no doubt, it adds to the value my father attaches to the inert books on the shelves and the inert boxes in the basement. It is difficult to understand just how inert most books are until we take a step back from our personal libraries and consider the matter in impersonal terms. Take one book: you know the story behind it. Perhaps a friend recommended it to you, glowing with admiration. Perhaps you stumbled upon it while taking shelter from the rain in a bookstore. Perhaps you have put off reading it for years, only to pick it up one day and realize that it is everything you could wish for. Perhaps you imagined its author as a kindred spirit. Perhaps—there are a million different reasons why the book is special to you. But when it’s your turn to step into the coffin or the crematorium, all these reasons go with you; all ties between you and your book are severed. When someone else looks at the book, all he sees is just that, a book. Your books may interest him; good, he may take some of them and make them part of his library. But more often than not, your books mean nothing to him; your interests do not overlap, and your memories are the constructions of different worlds. All he sees is a mountain of paper that he somehow has to get rid of. All I see when I stand in front of my parent’s library is an impressive, though occasionally perplexing, collection; the rest is utter indifference. I know that in my father’s eyes, these books have (or had) value; in my eyes, they have value too, but not enough to drive away my indifference. In fact, my indifference has reasserted itself with a note of anxiety; I cannot now stand before this library without realizing that one day I would have to dispose of it, and I have not the remotest idea who would like to take it from me.

“After all, can I really contend that my own collection of almost unkillable, inert books, ranged on shelves like some bogus declaration of achievement (for surely the philistine is right to ask the cultured owner, ‘Have you really read all these?’), tells my children anything more about me than my much smaller collection of postcards and photographs?”

Our collections are indeed “unkillable” and “inert” to the rest of the world. Too often we point to individual books as pieces of our reading souls; too often we use them to distinguish ourselves from the philistines, to make a statement, to argue ‘for’ or ‘against’—all this in an attempt to define ourselves and place ourselves in a niche in the world. But I paused before Wood’s premise that his books should tell his children something more about him than his postcards. Do you compile a library in the same way that you sit for an artist or a photographer, or with the same goal that motivated you as you arranged family photos in an album? Of course, books tell people less about your character than your postcards—what of that? The purpose of a book, or a collection of books, is not to inform people that you are such and such a person. To put a row of books beside a deck of postcards and ask: ‘Which of these tells you more about who I am?’ is like putting a tree next to a car and asking: ‘Which of these moves faster?’ We don’t buy and read a book because it tells people something about us; to do that, we speak—we write—we create. A personal library, even an eccentric one, is impersonal to everyone except its owner; if we want to know more about him, we turn to read his writing or to hear him speak, not to beg the library: ‘Be personal; tell us something about the man.’ After all, Wood himself said that libraries are inert; why should one expect them to be otherwise?

“The books somehow made [Messud] smaller, not larger, as if they were whispering: ‘What a little thing a single human life is, with all its busy, ephemeral, pointless projects.’ All ruins say this, yet we strangely persist in pretending that books are not ruins, not broken columns.”

The significance of reading a book, like the significance of writing one, lies in the fact that it is one of the countless tributaries that feed the ocean of our universal consciousness. Wood himself would have agreed that it was worth contributing to this consciousness (even if it was only a grudging, subconscious agreement) since he wrote and published this essay. Granted, a single project, a dozen projects, a hundred projects—they are all ruins, but it is on the vast ruin of human projects that we build our civilization. Books make us smaller precisely because they contain the best of us, a cloud that none of us can touch unless we stand on each other’s shoulders. Books may well be ruins: one book is a broken column; a dozen books are broken columns; exhaustive libraries are made of row after row of mighty but broken columns; perhaps Messud’s library is as useless as my father’s—two fields of broken columns with no end in sight. Your essay is a broken column too, Wood, as is mine—busy, ephemeral, and pointless, even without the fate of gathering dust on a bibliophile’s shelf. Yet despite all this I persist in believing that in the right hands, a million broken columns can prop up the world, while you may pretend that broken columns are always more than broken columns, and therefore the world must be propped up by something else.

Why is it that books must take the blame for the bibliophile? Bibliophiles like Messud and my father, in their enthusiasm or inertia, have forgotten that if books are bottled up, they shrivel and die, suffocated by polish, darkness, and dust. So take them out of the double-door library. Take them out of the desert.

All quotes in bold are taken from James Wood’s Serious Noticing: Selected Essays 1997-2019, published by Picador in 2019.