Unpacking My Library

“There is in the life of a collector a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order.” -Walter Benjamin

I am back in Minnesota, where the first things I see every morning, in any direction, are books. My bed is flanked by bookshelves, so whether I am facing the left or right, I’m taking in books. I keep my little Milkweed collection on my headboard, and the top shelf of my closet is likewise lined with books. I used to try to have an order to them: my closet-books start with English literature, then bleed into American authors that I don’t feel strongly about, then Goethe and Kafka and Camus … In Benjamin’s dialectic, I perhaps lean toward “disorder.”

I don’t see my compulsion as materialistic: I rarely purchase a book for its formal qualities, but rather for its spiritual promise. I thus absolve myself from any guilt that I might feel when buying books. It’s a funny, pious attitude that I adopt.

I can measure my life in books; collectively, they are my biography. Gazing to the right side of my bed this morning, I could see my 15 year-old Vonnegut phase and my early-undergraduate Zola period. I know, I talk like I’m Picasso, but perhaps the reader ought to be more valorized.

Every book is its own madeleine, scented with readers’ associations. (The madeleine frustrates me so much: I feel like you need to trudge through at least one of Proust’s novels in order to be entitled to that reference. Some pretentions need to be earned, damn it. Proust should have buried that nugget a little deeper in his massive oeuvre, rather than dropping it in the first 50 pages. He clearly wasn’t thinking like a TV producer…) Each book in my collection is an unintentional memento of the time and place where I read it. Catcher in the Rye: Central Park, summer 2003; Bel-Ami: New York’s subways, Teany, same summer; Crime and Punishment: started in New York, 2003, finished in Guadeloupe, 2005 (I have NO idea how that happened…); Tomorrow in Battle Think On Me: Bogota, cappuccino, June 2006. These powerful associations are partially what make me such a curmudgeonly lender.

Also what makes me a grudging lender: my sometimes-embarassing personal engagement with a book. I tend to swoon or sass in the margins.

Twice-read books acquire a special patina. I remember my first piecemeal reading of Tender is the Night when I was 16 years old, sprawled out in the sun on my trampoline. I read it again only two years later, when traveling through Western Europe and, oh, how luminous it became. I recall tearing through One Hundred Years of Solitude one summer in Northern Minnesota when I was 17. It was too cold to swim, so I just read, and much too quickly. I revisited that book five years later, when I was living in Guadeloupe, shortly before my first trip to Colombia. Magical realism made more sense in the Caribbean than by Minnesota’s lakes. (Although Russian literature also seemed appropriate in Guadeloupe, so go figure…)

And then there are my Good Intention books, cobblestones on my proverbial path to hell, books that I’ve owned for years but somehow haven’t gotten around to: Don Quixote, The Decameron, Paradise Lost… For shame, Megan, for shame. I can scarcely bear to make eye contact with these books.

My move to New York has cleaved my library in two, but the division is uneven: most of my books remain in Minnesota; art history, critical theory and reference books came to New York. I wonder if I’ll ever have one, unified library again. Sadly, books ARE things, and heavy things, that are not conducive to a gypsy-lifestyle.