We live in a house stocked with books.
The books trace an intimate, familial geography of sorts. On a lazy Sunday afternoon, one can wander through the house and mentally note where they lie, and how right things are.
There is the kitchen, set apart, with its simple shelf of cookbooks. Then there is the family room (this small world’s center of gravity), with its dictionaries, encyclopedias, various sets of Time-Life books (from Great Cities to Great Ages of Man) — the loyal waiters of quick knowledge — and, strewn here and there, day-old papers and wayward schoolbooks.
Off to a side is the girls’ room, crowded with shelves that speak, in a helter-skelter sort of way, of times past, present, and coming. There are our eldest daughter’s worn sets of Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew, retired to a cabinet, now abandoned for her collection of architecture books and magazines and desultory copies of Robert Ludlum and Amy Tan; nearby, the proud, newish, serially-ordered row of Sweet Valley Twins and Sweet Dreams of our second and third daughters; and, in the bathroom, a pile of handy Archie’s.
In our son’s room (now empty since he has gone to Manila for his studies) are old schoolbooks and a rather mixed and indefinite pile of titles on a desk: books of science, sports magazines, a book of Jose Rizal quite snug beside a biography of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
In the master bedroom are the shelves of my wife’s collection of Christian literature and old baby books. And exiled to the guest room are my old books, an accumulation of years, rows of titles uniformly forbidding and somber, books read and unread, reminders of interests once picked up and then set aside (volumes of Asian and African writing), and of passions that now lie quietly collecting dust on the shelves (paperbacks of the most somber authors you can find, Kafka, Turgenev, Mann, Sartre, Camus).
Then there is the “office-and-library” with its floor-to-ceiling shelves of “Filipiniana,” books on anything Philippine, from books on the Philippine Revolution and World War II to books on Philippine orchids and mosquitoes (even books in languages I cannot read, French, German, and Japanese, simply because they are books on the Philippines). The glass-encased artifacts of a bibliophile’s odd passion.
We have run out of cabinets and shelves and the books have spilled onto tables and floor. From time to time, we talk about putting up additional shelves. Or banning more books from coming into the house. There are times, too, when we consider discarding some of the unwanted excess.
We never throw away anything of course. The rooms would seem strangely naked without them. They are this household’s only distinctive possessions. They have willy-nilly grown to be an important part of what defines this, our domestic space.
I see more than just architectural space. Books do not only furnish a room, they furnish a life. To browse through a shelf of old books is to retrace a journey taken. I cannot, for instance, linger over the now slightly discolored copies of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, or Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, or Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, or Albert Camus’ The Plague without remembering, if fleetingly, something of the quiet melancholy, deep joy, and, yes, youthful passion of that original moment they were first read many, many years ago. And, lingering, be ambushed by a sense of what has been gained and (perhaps more sharply) what has been lost.
I would like to think the sentiment is not mine alone.
Books take up space, clutter the house like a hoard of objects of dubious worth. Yet, there they are, quietly breathing where they lie. A paper trail you can pick up to retrace your way to where the life of the imagination began. Or a trail, leading outwards, to where you have not quite gone.
15 August 1993
House of Memory: Essays
Resil B. Mojares
~
Filed under: Quotes, books, resil mojares
Recent Comments