So Husband and I, we have a library. It’s ¾ of a room, floor to ceiling, covered in books. And a lot of people, in conversation – admittedly mostly architects, who are known to sort books by color and treat text as a visual block rather than something to be read (don’t even pretend to be offended, you know it’s true) – act like having a library is a bad thing. Like it’s a terribly snobby thing to do. Because color-block books that everyone knows you haven’t read aren’t at all snobby. At all.
Here’s the thing about the library. It’s all the books. The books we’ve read, and the books we haven’t read. The ones we bought out of an aspiration to read them, yes, and also the terrible, trashy fantasy novels that we tear through like wrapping paper. The awful, misguided books we’ve gotten as gifts from well-meaning parents and distant relations trying to change our politics. Books we bought by accident. Multiple copies of books we actively dislike. Multiple copies of books that we’ve never read, sometimes all the copies belonging to one person (Husband). Twin books we bought, each for the other, before we were married. At least three English dictionaries. Grad school text books. Undergrad reading lists. Pop-science books that no one, anywhere, should be forced to read. Comic books and children’s books and absurdist books of made-up games. Game design, furniture design, theatrical design, complexity theory, right-wing and left-wing political screeds – it’s all in there.
It’s kind of anti-snobby. The library has very little to do with who we want to be, or how we want to be seen. There’s a thorough sampling of Paddington Bear cuddling up to Ray Bradbury, with The Decameron whispering in its other ear. There's an awful book I bought in London because it mentioned the neighborhood I lived in. It was the worst book I'd ever read (and read multiple times), until Husband bought me the freaking sequel for Christmas last year as a mean joke. As a collection of books, the library makes no sense.
But that's because the library is not self-image so much as an archaeological resource.
For instance. Husband made a joke tonight about watching “Die Hard” at Christmas. And then, washing the dishes and soaking my stomach in dishwater at the sink, I thought about how really, if we’re going to Netflix anything for Christmas, it should be the 1960s cartoon specials I totally want to see (because clearly, what I want wins, which is the major bonus of being the girl in the Netflix relationship – no work, automatic veto power, and the ability to stamp your little foot and get what you want). And then I thought about how we had toyed with the idea of having a 1960s Christmas Cartoon Movie Extravaganza, and then realized that we don’t own a dvd player and our tv is really small, so we should do it at That Guy’s house, but That Guy’s roommate is showing It’s A Wonderful Life already, and then I thought about all the bajillions of times I’ve already seen It’s A Wonderful Life (which somehow That Guy has managed to never see), and then I thought about the time I saw it on a big screen in London, at the Somethingorother Film Center, and about the guy who tried to pick me up in the café before the movie, and how he’d written his number in my copy of Lord of the Rings, which I had bought for 242 Danish Kroner at the Copenhagen Airport… so then I got up and went in the library, and picked up the book and looked inside, and there he was. Steve O’Donnell. Phone number and all.
We have friends who have no books. Hard to believe, but true. We know fully-grown, married people who headed off to Amsterdam to live with nothing more than what fit in their duffel bags. We know people who throw out books, or sell them to used bookstores (which we appreciate, because then we buy them), or only read things from libraries. It appears possible. And at the same time, I, at least, mourn the books that have been lost over the years. Children’s books whose names are just out of reach. All the books I gave away at the end of college, displayed last on a half-refinished table set up on the vacant lot we used as a lawn. All of them grabbed up by neighborhood children and never seen again. They were the most embarrassing books I ever owned – terrible Orson Scott Card and Piers Anthony trash – and I miss them. Because they held my hand, too, for a while. I’ll never buy them again, and if they were with us, I would cringe when people coming by the apartment saw them, but they would be up there on the shelf, along with all the others, because the library is uncensored. It’s just out there. If you look, you can see pretty much everything.
Of course, the books are also there to read. And we read them. Some of them over and over again, some of them just once or twice, some of them only a few pages, some of them not at all. We moan about having nothing to read while thousands of pages wait for us, hopeful and unread, on the homemade shelves that are quietly destroying the structural integrity of our rented apartment, that will go on doing so until we tuck the books back into the (at last count) twenty-five boxes that wait, crammed behind and under our furniture, a fire hazard if ever there was one, and carry them down the stairs and into a truck and out of a truck and up, always up, always at least one flight of stairs. We labor over them, these books. Regardless of whether or not we like them, or have read them, or are ever going to read them. They are non-negotiable. They come with us because they are us, our collected histories, our inexplicable archaeologies. Without them we would be referent-less pronouns, adrift in a dissipating sea of language. And what would befall us then? And how would we measure what it means?
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