My books are beings to me. I sometimes slowly and visually caress the leather and cloth covers with my eyes, trace old gold leaf scroll with my fingertips, grab the spines on the shelf and pull them partway out as if to reassure myself that they are still sitting there whole, with the pages inside intact. This isn't really a materially-based love affair; it's a sensory one. I have read most of them, but not all of them. I carry the conceit, and I know the arrogance of it, that I own a small area of the author as I read their written words.
How the danger ebbs and flows;
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling
And the wrangling,
How the danger sinks and swells,...
Some books I've acquired at sales, some while working at Powell's Books briefly in Portland a couple of decades ago, a lifetime or two from here. Some I obtained at an estate sale of a fascinating lady who I had the brief privilege to meet one Halloween night eight years ago. Brownie was 94 years old when she died, and had lived on the same estate all of her life. It was her parent's home, a lovely brick Tudor built in 1927 after the original 1880's Gothic four story turreted mansion succumbed to fire on the property. The house, and three others built by her father, Judge Max Harrison, took up an entire city block in Seattle near Lake Washington, a block away from what was the original trolley car line in Seattle, a couple of blocks up the hill from the now forgotten Yesler wooden trolley trestle. This wonderful brick home, with its stained and leaded glass windows, medieval shields in amber set into the panes, was filled to bursting with just about everything acquired by either Brownie or her parents over the course of her life.
Brownie was an opera singer of some renown in the early years of the twentieth century. I know that she sang at Carnegie Hall. In the latter years of her life, she sold a slice of her property so that she could afford the construction of an elevator shaft on the outside northern wall of her house. This enabled her to continue to use her bedroom on the second floor, as she was bound to a wheelchair. Neighbors have told me that she was near 300 lbs when she passed, but I don't remember her size. It was dark that Halloween night and she was charming and frail and handed out candy to my kids from her wheelchair as we trick-or-treated around the neighborhood.
Within a year, she died and her storybook large brick Tudor house, with its wonderful hundred year old black chestnut tree as big as the house across the street, was put up for sale. Friends of mine now own the property, thankfully, and it hasn't been divided in any way. They are good stewards of the neighborhood.
Her remaining family members removed what they wanted and put the rest of her possessions up for estate sale. There were mink stoles, fancy felt hats fit for the Ascot, long ballroom gowns that may have been performance costumes. Boxes upon boxes of sheet music. An old threadbare Persian rug that fit the huge living room as if it were woven specifically for the dimensions. This rug had not ever been moved in the entire life of the house, so the oak floor underneath was pristine, though gummy with the lanolin and dyes of the aged carpet.
There were shelves of old books. I was in heaven. The estate seller gave up at the end of a long weekend of exhausting work herding hundreds of buyers through. On a Monday as he was removing the balance of what hadn't been sold, I stopped by, as I had been by several times over the course of the weekend and he now knew me. He offered me the balance of the books that hadn't sold and it was an esoteric lot. I couldn't resist (he had no idea of my addiction, poor man). Volumes of Scribner's Monthly bound magazines in leather from the 1870's and 1880's (essays by Mark Twain and Henry James, poetry by and articles about Edgar Allan Poe, fabulous etchings by artists lost to time).
National Geographic magazines from the 1920's and 30's. An 1872 edition of The Poetical Works of Lord Byron. Alfred, Lord Tennyson (sigh), a five volume set of History of the American People by Woodrow Wilson. The missing volume II of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire which I had searched for over years, though the binding is green and my flawed set is dark red. A 1903 cardinal red leather copy of Monsieur Beaucaire by Booth Tarkington. Other lost and forgotten authors, faded from time artists, once iconic but now unrecognized poets.
There was also a curious tiny book, The Song of Our Syrian Guest bound in a rather unremarkable taupe grosgrain fabric, but magically illustrated internally with gold leaf embossed drop cap text and fine drawings by Charles Copeland. The description of this tome on Amazon relates that the book, authored by William Allen Knight, is "an interpretation of the Shepherd Psalm as told by a man whose home was among the Syrian shepherds. The author writes that it was told to him by a guest straight from David's land as they sat together one night over fragrant cups of tea." The dedication in the frontispiece reads, "To the hand that held the tea-ball and the faces of the two little maids".
I could tell you more of this book and the contents within, but for now, know that it is a book that gently moves through the Middle East landscape and fleshes out a meaning far deeper and richer in history and culture than what we in the West now so often sorrowfully assign in meaning to the 23rd Psalm. I am not religious, nor a biblical student, but this small, thin volume wiped the mournful tone of "the Valley of the Shadow of Death" from my mind and created a more secular, though no less profound image of how the shepherd navigates daily through life, performing mundane tasks that are meant to keep the wolf at bay. A shepherd knows where the snake holes are and directs his sheep away from them. The arid land has little water and he knows how to find the essential stream for his sheep and how to settle the sheep quietly so that they are comfortable and calm as they drink from still water, for they will not normally drink from a running and busy stream. He knows what grasses they can eat and what weeds they should avoid. He counts them and cleans them; they know his voice and only his when he calls. He knows how to navigate not only valleys, but how to avoid blind trails and hollows where there are too many obstacles. The shepherd knows how to keep them safe and get them home when it is time to come home.
I am moving on Saturday; I am defeated in my last stand at maintaining my current residence, and I'm moving on to cheaper digs. I've sorted and thrown out and taken loads to Goodwill, and boxed some belongings up for long-term storage, as the apartment where we are going is considerably smaller. I've reduced the detritus to a decent minimum - well, at least I'm not dragging the old school papers from college, the lesson plans from my brief teaching career years ago, nor the boxes upon boxes of my kids' schoolwork that I previously couldn't throw out. I'm not carting the old clothes I'll fit into again anymore, nor the old shoes I'm certain can come back into style. That wonderful old pine shelf has to go. I'm so grateful to still have a roof over my head - these losses are paltry and insignificant compared to all that others have experienced over this year on the Gulf Coast, drought and wartorn Africa, the bombarded and damaged Middle East and I'm very conscious of this. I've lost the weight of accumulation of years and gained even more familiar financial debt. There is a strange symmetry, I know, if I can just find it now.
There sit my books on multiple dusty shelves. How can I release them? How can I store them? How can I box up Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations or Whittier's Complete Poetical Works and not unpack it again in a few days?
An odd little cartoon from Scribners. May 1880, volume 20, Bric-a-brac section.
I think of The Song of Our Syrian Guest and the valleys we walk through, no matter who we are or where we are going. We must bring our troops home. We must secure Afghanistan. We must stop torture - we have become what we should fear and despise the most. If we are the wolf, we're not the shepherd and where is the reason to sustain a future for our children? I think of who we need to protect and the values we base protection and security on - the real values, not the rhetorical shields ambiguously and facetiously thrown up when politically expedient by those I can't bring myself to name. For our children, for ourselves, for the both the ideals and people we are entrusted to watch over and protect, we can't let such shadows continue to grow.
"The people - ah, the people
They that dwell up in the steeple
All alone
And who tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone,--
They are neither man nor woman,
They are neither brute nor human,
They are Ghouls."
I'm a selfish creature. As I tell my daughters to pack wisely and distill, reduce, remove, I am packing every single book again. I mark all the book boxes with "living room" labels and smile. I'll still have a living room, a reading lamp, a chair.
(Excerpts from Edgar Allan Poe - "The Bells")
