How Books Become Who We Are
What books would you save from a fire?
“There’s a reason that every book ... is shaped like a suitcase.” ~ Sergei Dovlatov
Insomnia means that I sometimes haunt the blue-black hours before sunrise, violently alive in sleepless misery. Though my body is exhausted, my mind is running the machinery of thought at full speed. On nights like this, I give it something to do by asking myself a question: What would I pack into a bag for safekeeping in case of a fire?
I imagine a fairly average suitcase, and then I proceed to fill it with what could reasonably fit within. I assume that essentials — phone, wallet, toothbrush, toothpaste, etc. — are already taken care of. So what non-essentials will I pack?
My mind always goes to books. Well, which books? The first editions and signed copies demand a place in this luggage-cum-lifeboat; they’re of value not only to myself but to the wider literary world and future bibliophiles. What about books that describe me or the progress of my life? If I can list the ones that document the history of who I am, perhaps those should be the books I preserve for myself.
This mental exercise was inspired by Sergei Dovlatov’s The Suitcase (1986). His irreverent novella begins with Dovlatov having emigrated to America with his wife and son. One day, the mother sends the boy to sit in the closet (a strange remedy for misbehaviour), where he discovers an old suitcase. Dovlatov takes it to the kitchen table and unpacks its few items, from a “decent double-breasted suit” to “Finnish nylon crêpe socks”. These are the physical remains of his life in the USSR.
On the inside of the suitcase lid is a photo of the poet Joseph Brodsky. At the bottom of the case, beneath the folded clothes, mothballs, and memories, is a single sheet of newspaper from which Karl Marx stares. “On the bottom was Karl Marx,” Dovlatov notes drily. “On the lid was Brodsky. And between them, my lost, precious, only life.” He almost calls the resulting book, which documents the memories that escape from the folds of those forgotten clothes, From Marx to Brodsky.
What, I wonder, would I title the book of my own life using the same formula? I would take books as my markers, beginning with the earliest to leave a lasting impression. From Tintin to... To what? The most recent book I’d read was Roth’s The Human Stain. So, From the Land of the Soviets to the Human Stain. Or, more simply, From Tintin to Roth. Not quite as exciting. I’m certain, at least, that I’d have to begin an account of my life in literature with Hergé’s Tintin.
THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN, BY HERGÉ
There are long-forgotten picture books I chewed on with toothless gums, but my relationship with them now is purely theoretical; they taught me to love books in an abstract sense, but beyond that I question how much they shaped me. I do know that there was a book read to me when I was a small child, which I associate with my grandmother, and which I can’t think of now without momentarily losing the ability to speak. It’s called Love You Forever, and my vision blurs writing that much.
But I honestly can’t say whether my memories of that book precede my earliest recollections of turning the pages of a Tintin comic and following the pictures left to right. Those brightly coloured hardbacks began as picture books before graduating to texts I could read. Our local library only ever had the same four or five titles, so I borrowed them in rotation and noticed more each time I did. That’s how I learned that books are not “dead”, not frozen curios that offer finite material in one reading.
I read Tintin as a boy in Canada to learn and grow, and I continued to read Tintin as a teenager in England to escape a less colourful reality in which the maps were all explored. I inevitably went off reading those comics as I entered my late teens, because I’d become a serious reader who had no time for such folly. (In other words, I was an unbearably pretentious young adult, rejecting the anti-intellectualism of my small-town upbringing.) In my late twenties, I rediscovered some childhood joy by revisiting the Tintin books.
I now own the full collection. They look very smart lined up on the top of a tall bookcase, with their spines creating a rainbow from which I can select a Tintin story to read on rainy days when I’m feeling nostalgic. The familiar genre-crossing tales of the boy-reporter, the drunken captain, and the loyal canine companion still remind me of the person I was in that life I used to live. Now, though, they also evoke the man I’d become when I rediscovered the joys of childish adventures. Eventually, they’ll remind me no doubt of the children I’ll pass them on to.
So, Tintin will be a book (cheating: set of books) to go into the suitcase of safekeeping.
A SMALL COLLECTION OF FORGOTTEN READS
I think of my life in literary terms as the Age of Learning to Read, then the Age of Reading Widely, and then the Age of Reading Well.
While that second era (circa my mid-teens to early twenties) was vital in my development as a reader and writer, there were some casualties to the method this epoch employed. I read so much and so compulsively — like a desert-island survivor’s first meal consumed with wild abandon — that much of my reading went through me without my digesting very much of its nutrients. I’d fly rapturously through a book and then move on to the next. As a result, there are books I know I’ve read and yet couldn’t tell you a thing about.
Some of these unfortunate victims are:
1984 by Orwell. I honestly don’t know how many of the few thoughts I have on this book (read when I was about thirteen) are my own or have been adopted from other readers writing about this famous novel.
Emma by Jane Austen. All I can recall, having read it way back in my early twenties, is great disappointment — that it was nothing like as enchanting as Pride and Prejudice — and finding the titular heroine truly annoying.
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. I wonder if what little I recall is of the book or from the movie.
A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin. I know I loved it at the time, but now I don’t remember why.
I wonder what made me devour them so urgently that I didn’t give them the required care and attention. I think it was an effort to “catch up” on the education I’d missed in my school years. This goal was like the double-breasted suit in The Suitcase. A bargain was struck between Dovlatov and his editor: write “three socially significant articles by the New Year” and his bonus would be a suit. Dovlatov set off enthusiastically to tell these remarkable stories, much as I pursued the goal of reading as many stories as I could. He hoped for a grand suit as his reward, and I hoped for a grand education.
In the end, his efforts were scuppered by the kind of random absurdity that came with living under Soviet rule. Ultimately, the story he found to tell wasn’t anything like what his editor had in mind, and it came decades past his deadline — the story of his failure to find a story. I can’t tell you much about many of the novels I read at that time in my life, but I do have the story of my failing to learn much from those stories. All of those forgotten books deserve a more attentive reading, so a few of them will get a place in my suitcase.
HOWARDS END IS ON THE LANDING, BY SUSAN HILL
Is a forgotten thing lost forever, or can it leave some impression on the subconscious mind? Do we each have a cognitive history marked ineradicably by the ideas that have passed through it, the way our bodies bear the “indelible stamp of [their] lowly origin”?
One of the turning points in the way I was learning came when I read Howards End is on the Landing (2010) by Susan Hill. It is, sadly, one of those books I struggle to recall many details from. But there is a paragraph I can recall, not verbatim, but in its most vital essence. Hill wrote a damning indictment of speed reading that shook out of my head the last remnants of the fallacy that more books equal more understanding. I’ve allowed myself to scour the book for this passage to reproduce part of it here:
“Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading ... will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence.”
I so wanted all of the great novels I read to “burrow down into [my] memory and become part of [myself]”. I desired to be built out of books. I could only articulate what this might look like by pointing to those writers (Christopher Hitchens, Lawrence Durrell, Roth’s young Zuckerman) who embodied the idea. As I scan the words in Hill’s book that passed through my eyes and into my brain once long before, I find a passage that expresses what I mean (and I wonder whether this is the origin of the idea in my mind):
“If you cut me open, you will find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every [book] I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me.”
This is why I — and anyone who appreciates all that humanity has achieved so far, and who’s not arrogant or unserious enough to think the great minds of yesterday have nothing to do with today — want to soak up the wisdom of the ancient epics and culture myself with the classics. I did not, however, become a serious reader until I granted myself the less-than-modest permission to determine my own canon. I learned to judge novels by my own criteria, informed by the many traditions I’m the product of, from Athens and Jerusalem through the Enlightenment to Postmodernism, and yet distinctly of my own patchwork making.
“But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA.”
I won’t say that Hill’s book was the direct reason I began the university course through which I eventually got my degree in English Literature, or why I created Art of Conversation, my life-long autodidactic course in the humanities. But Hill’s book did precede those studies in a meaningful way, which ensures it a place in my suitcase.
PACKING MY LIBRARY, BY ALBERTO MANGUEL
In Packing My Library — Alberto Manguel’s account of collapsing his thirty-five thousand books into the soulless detainment of storage units — Manguel writes:
“Johannes Gutenberg created the illusion that we are not unique and that every copy of the Quixote is the same as every other (a trick which has never quite convinced most of its readers).”
Two books with the same cover are never precisely the same book. To believe that there’s no private relationship between your fingers and the corners of a book; to think the stain of bath water along the bottom edge of certain pages is incidental; to ignore the involuntary association your mind makes between this sentence and that memory of a bee landing by your elbow the first time you read the book; to shrug off the idea that, in spite of the known fidelity of modern printing, this particular book somehow contains a version of the story unique to you alone — to believe anything like all of that is to believe that identical twins are the exact same person. These things are complicated. To simplify them is to make life that much less beautiful.
My wife and I once moved to Mexico with nothing but a rucksack of clothes and a handful of novels. I quickly learned the importance of the individual identities of books, deprived as I was of those I’d made my own with notes in the margins, folded corners, creased pages, covers smudged with food. My copy of Packing My Library has been stripped of its dustcover, which I found a little ugly. I may not be the only person in the world to own a hardback edition of this book sans dustcover, but I am the only person to own this version, made naked for my particular reasons, motivated by my personal preferences. It may not mean much, but it doesn’t mean nothing.
After those six months with a drastically reduced library, I decided my home in the future would always be where my collection of books was. I thought, like Manguel did, that “once the books found their place, I would find mine”. Many readers have felt this way, whether their library is a single shelf in the corner of a small flat or an entire room full of a lifetime’s reading. As Manguel puts it: “My library was to me an utterly private space that both enclosed and mirrored me.”
This might seem a rather grandiloquent theory for what others see as a hobby or, perhaps, an obsession with hoarding. Yes, there can be as many prosaic motivations for collecting books as noble reasons, from wanting to impress visitors to simply setting oneself a challenge: these books are here to be read, so I’d better read them. More poetically, though no less truthfully, the fundamental reason for collecting books is that books are a way of navigating life. They’re a way of directing one’s path through what Nabokov calls this “brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness”.
I look at my relatively full suitcase and scan the titles I’ve tucked inside, wondering if this is really the best selection of books for ... for what? For posterity? For my own future reading? As representative of the life I’ve lived so far, or the life I hope to live? Is this collection descriptive or aspirational? An answer comes again from Manguel:
“I’ve often felt that my library explained who I was, gave me a shifting self that transformed itself constantly throughout the years.”
This is why a library is never finished and why my choice of books will change every time I imagine this suitcase — because the story is always being written. Change is the theme against which the narrative of life unfolds. On another sleepless night I will place an entirely different group of books into the imaginary suitcase. There’s never one absolute suitcase of books, just as there’s never a definitive account of who I am.
Manguel recounts a story about Borges commenting on the supposed inferiority of a translation of an original text, as if that original is somehow decisive. “The concept of a definitive text,” wrote Borges, “belongs only to religion or to fatigue.” Manguel goes on to relate this to how books describe our lives only contingently:
“Like Borges’s text, I have no definitive biography. My story changes from library to library, or from the draft of one library to the next, never one precisely, never the last.”
For now, Unpacking My Library goes into my suitcase, not as the definitive Manguel book, but as representative of the relationship I have to his writing. I can’t help but feel quite grateful as I mentally slip the book into the suitcase.
These days, my interests have turned to the past, to what was and what remains of what was. My tastes have opened to those formative books I devoured as a young reader, from the first Tintin comics to the terribly written and terribly thrilling Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. That book alone almost sent me down a what-might-have-been alternate road in which I became a palaeontologist; perhaps I did become that in some way, with my attention focusing more and more on unearthing the past.
In the end, the title for the story of my life could be From Tintin to Tintin. Or There and Back Again (to borrow from another rediscovered gemstone in the dragon’s lair of childhood). I sometimes wonder whether a meaningful education, or even life itself, is ultimately Joyce’s “commodius vicus of recirculation” — that is, the expansive space in which we circuitously return again and again to the past.
Our libraries seem to reflect this view. They’re collections of books we’ve read, waiting for their moment to be re-read, and other books we hope to one day read and so relegate — no, elevate — to the past tense. I wander the shelves of my growing collection and rediscover old truths, and in that rediscovering I discover things new to me, which then await their own rediscovery one day.
However, the view from the library is not only over one’s shoulder; any collection of books is an inherent investment in the future. Captain Nemo, in his mighty ship so many leagues beneath the sea, houses in his library all those voices he believes deserve to be spared the destruction he wishes on the rest of the surface world. This is, in essence, what all of our libraries are for: we seek to safeguard those words we’ve deemed important and know will likely need to be heard again one day, perhaps by somebody else. In this sense, our libraries are suitcases in which we pack special belongings for safekeeping. What will you keep in yours?