The delights of my haunted room
LATELY, I’ve been reading in another man’s library. Which is not, I hasten to add, a euphemism of any kind. I’ve been sitting in the silence of some 200 tomes, most of them unfamiliar to me, doing the work of May, which is to say the work of the angels sent by the autumn literary festivals and this newspaper’s book awards.
It’s been a strange but elevating experience. A personal library is more than a cherished collection of books, it’s also the best device for remembering who you were at certain stages of your life. It’s an anti-graveyard full of anti-tombstones, each telling a double life story: its own, and the story of when its path crossed yours. Your library is your external brain.
If it’s a brain, though, it’s not a particularly efficient one. I recently had to move mine to the place where I now live, packing it into 20 boxes and carting it across town. My back wishes I had a Lilliputian brain.
I first packed my library’s left hemisphere, non-fiction, then the right, novels and poetry. I keep them strictly separate. Not so the gentleman for whose shelves they’re destined: in my new place, which is still in many ways his place (he is sadly deceased), the books are organised, as best I can discern, by height.
This tells you something about the man whose study I’m about to take over, without even looking at a book title: he was tidy, he loved order. Working among his books, while mine remain in their boxes, is like sailing on a ghost ship: you can feel the lingering, guiding presence of his mind in the room.
‘Working among his books is like sailing on a ghost ship’
Because height mattered more than content or author, there’s a diverting randomness in this library. He was a medical doctor and a bon vivant, so on the shelf for tall books, for example, The Structure and Function of Skin stands next to The World Atlas of Wine. I checked the former for any mention of burst blood vessels in the nose due to excess consumption of Bordeaux — a fate I deeply fear — but found no edification. I was able to brush up on basal cytoplasm, however.
Among the medium-sized books, Lawrence Durrell’s shocking-for-its-time Alexandria
Quartet finds itself next door to The Modern
Jewish Woman: A Unique Perspective, published in Brooklyn in 1981. Jewish women, you’ll be pleased to learn that “shifting gears from the contemporary professional world to the traditional roles of wife and mother can be unexpectedly fulfilling”. No doubt especially when this means escaping “Being Embalmed in the Formaldehyde of Academia”, as one of the authors cheerfully puts it.
The happiest pairing among his smaller books is Tales of the Alhambra cheek by jowl with 501 Spanish Verbs. ¡Vámonos!
It’s one thing to be embalmed in academia, another to be embalmed in someone else’s library, which can yield unexpected delights. I miss my books and look forward to unpacking them, but there’s time still for a further stroll down another man’s memory lane.