Perspective:On Libraries, Public and PrivateYaacov Luria
PERSPECTIVE ON LIBRARIES.PIBLIC AND PRIVATE YAACOV LURLA In any listing of probable constants of human nature, the compulsion to collect things would seem to have an assured place. I admit to...
...Thereafter I began running through books like a grass fire in a drought...
...It is not altogether a bad thing to own a book, mine to be underlined, marginally notated, referred to, reread...
...So my older sister undertook to teach me to read...
...The suspense mounted with "You have lots of persistence, don't give up now" and reached a peak with, "Bear up, you're almost there...
...It is precisely the book I need to plug one of the biggest holes in my background...
...If my wife Miriam and I were not bonded by some mystical glue more cohesive than Elmer's that has held us together for thirty-six years, books would have split us apart...
...When I first read it as a twenty-year-old college senior, I was enraptured...
...These days, when I do not borrow books but possess them, I have, like a millionaire softened by a surfeit of goodies, lost all sense of urgency...
...Beautiful books present problems...
...I begin my task, in the melancholy Jaques' phrase, "creeping like a snail unwillingly," sighing over every book I finally place on the discard pile, wondering tremulously how different my life, emptied of that book, will be henceforth...
...Grown older, I went to the library for more than books...
...Pronto...
...It's a kind of home by Robert Frost's definition—"When you have to go there, they have to let you in...
...I was well past my seventh birthday before the curtain was parted...
...In fact, the musty massive-ness of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel rebukes me from a bookshelf as I write this...
...He signed, then asked me, "You really read it...
...And yet, though Mishneh Torah rests on my shelf virtually unread, I defer to no one in my love for this book...
...When I snatched the volume from a bookstall on Fourth Avenue forty years ago, I still had an English major's infatuation with the wily Lord Chancellor's epigrammatic wit...
...For me the essence of this literary artifact—what it has to say—was lost at the bindery...
...Saturday mornings, even in howling winter gales, I stood waiting on a long line for the library to open...
...I remember tears flowing, in sorrow and in joy...
...A neighbor of mine owns a piano which takes up half of her livingroom...
...In my young days, having no money for books, I borrowed them from the public library and read them promptly...
...Or—" I have never had the courage to test the "or...
...Loving books without reading them is as great a vice as loving money for its own sake...
...Books in public libraries are designed to endure, to go through many readers' hands but to remain in none...
...Hooray, or alas, I am not the same lad who once thrilled to...
...What hinders me from surrendering Boswell's Life of Johnson or The English Philosophers from Bacon to MilP...
...There was a resurgence of civic-mind-edness among my neighbors...
...his heart flooded his face with lakes of blood...
...we are both adept at deceiving ourselves...
...I admit to being an obsessive collector, the result, possibly, of being descended from a grandmother who amassed so many featherbeds that she used a ladder to climb onto the summit perina of her bed, only a scant few inches short of her ceiling...
...I grabbed books to my bosom and fought for them...
...animals speaking—in an incomprehensible dialect yet—were kin to Jabberwocky...
...My dust-laden copy of Crime and Punishment contains evidence that I once faulted the tormented student Raskolnikov for not becoming a YIPSEL or a YCLer...
...Let me live in the anticipation that someday I shall risk piercing the gossamer which surrounds my boxed set of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past...
...I feel welcome at the supermarket, the drug store and the luncheonette that face the library— so long as I have money in my jeans...
...Miriam tolerates the unending proliferation of my books until a day when something untoward happens...
...For ten years, for instance, my conscience has been pricked every day by the presence of Maimonides' Mishneh Torah, with Hebrew and English text abridged and annotated by Philip Birnbaum...
...The news evoked an intense feeling of loss...
...Before I have come to the end of a paragraph, my mind is wandering...
...Women took turns having her at their homes for lunch...
...The librarian then was a thin-faced spinster who, because she had no family of her own, was adopted into everyone's family...
...Readers senior enough to be luxuriating in the largess of social security will remember the old Modern Library Giants, grey-blue or brown cloth-bound tomes hefty enough to serve as lethal weapons...
...Bulky as the books are, though, they are not as heavy as the burden of guilt I bear over all those I haven't read...
...Inertia...
...The more books I collect, the fewer I read...
...Timidly, one afternoon, I ventured into the Seward Park Library on East Broadway for the first time...
...If you do not recognize the short forms once used for the Young People's Socialist League or the Young Communist League, rejoice in your youth...
...At the heart of such love is avarice...
...Actually, there are not many books to which I return...
...I am reminded that the victims of the Jonestown horror merit more compassion than condemnation, certainly from me...
...My faith was sorely tried by, "Tarheel, you still with me...
...And so that she wouldn't go hungry on weekends, they trooped into the library on Friday afternoon with plates of gefilte fish and fresh cinnamon and raisin buns...
...My worst misgivings were fulfilled at last on page 419, where I was rudely let down with, "Sucker, nobody told you curiosity killed a cat...
...With some books I have had a longstanding platonic affair from afar...
...His work last appeared in moment September 1978...
...for a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love...
...If I were broke, the library alone will let me in and let me loiter...
...Both the text and the illustrations struck me as weird, tokens of the unknowable world of grownups...
...It was a mistake...
...So with the best will in the world I open Mishneh Torah and focus my attention on a lucid passage setting forth the laws forbidding usury...
...Superstitious awe...
...When the door latch was turned at last, I was carried inside on a human wave and deposited near the brand new books which the librarians had just set out on tables...
...I have never ventured into a third paragraph at a sitting for fear of being flagrantly disrespectful to a magnum opus of the great Rambam...
...they subscribed several thousand dollars to a fund for keeping the library open...
...I was hooked...
...she reminds me gently but insistently how brief life and time are...
...I overheard two elderly men on a park bench reminiscing about the days when the library was only a dark ground floor room in an apartment house...
...I possess an ancient copy of Francis Bacon's Essays with voluminous moral annotations by Richard Whately, D.D., Archbishop of Dublin, which I would not surrender at the point of a switch blade...
...Marginal notes, after the passage of years, hardly seem one's own...
...But I still sniff the yellow-brown leather binding, stroke the knobby spine, riffle the rag paper pages, savor the antique typeface— I wallow in sensuous delight...
...Once more I'll start collecting masses of books, which someday, I may even get to read...
...Books seemed destined to be forever closed to me...
...Apart from the pleasure of communing with erudite or whimsical readers, there is another reason I wish I had remained more faithful to the public library...
...Just to oblige her—in those days children did not trifle with commands of grownups—I began reading my first book...
...You can't go home again, in more than one sense...
...My sister tried Tales of Uncle Remus with no more success...
...I was painfully shy with girls, but here— buoyed up by the confidence that I just had to have something in common with girls who went to the library—I sometimes summoned up the courage to speak to attractive strangers...
...Now, I find plowing through its highblown rhetoric arduous rather than exciting...
...Then I must choose: "Get rid of books—lots of books...
...It is her most cherished piece of furniture, and that is all it is...
...There is something vague, hence fascinating, about marginal comments like ? or !. Less elusive are remarks like "What a fool...
...The library was my youth center, where I met friends and carried on nonstop chatter (to the distress of a generation of librarians...
...How often does an investment of a quarter yield both a mitzvah and an autographed masterpiece by a Nobel Prize winner...
...Before they began using heavy plastic covers on trade editions, libraries used to put their books in grim bindings of buckram board...
...In one book I remember, a note bade me, "Turn to page 79...
...Intimidation by Cultural Tradition...
...It was Johann Speyer's Heidi, the sentimental story of a little girl's visit to her grandfather in an Alpine village...
...If it fell into the hands of a loyal supporter of Israel, I rejoice in his mazel...
...I can read, borrow books, or just let my mind wander...
...Could I ever have been naive enough to believe that losing oneself in a group could lead to individual salvation...
...To the immigrant generation of my parents, the public library was a do-it-yourself university...
...Many years ago I took the book to a lecture I. B. Singer gave at a Workman's Circle branch and asked him to autograph it...
...No one chases me out—until closing time...
...How much simpler my life would be if I had no multitudes of books to dust, stuff into cartons and tuck away into the rear of closets...
...or "knee jerk liberal mush" or "Right on, buster...
...Apparently, she has the rest of her life to bring herself to doing it...
...Possibly embarrassed by this grass roots fervor, which even the Times considered news fit to print, the city fathers found the money to rescind the closing orders...
...I am partial to the public library because it was there that I was initiated into the pleasures of print...
...The book ended up, I think, in a rummage sale for the Red Mogen David...
...Try this book, sonny," she said...
...Overwhelmed by the dazzle of books, I just stood and stared...
...Occasionally, cumulative comments emerge as a plot complete with rising action, climax and denouement...
...A few years ago the Mayor announced the imminent closing of a string of libraries, my neighborhood branch at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx among them...
...Then a librarian took my hand and led me to a table...
...Yaacov Luria is a freelance writer whose fiction and poetry is published in The New Yorker and Harper's...
...When I told him emphatically that I had, he wrote "To a faithful reader with thanks" over his signature...
...I haven't sampled Bacon with Whately, or Whately on Bacon, for years...
...From their critical reputations I have idealized them to an unreal perfection from which close contact is bound to topple them...
...Besides hoarding lightweight stuff like newspaper clippings, scrap paper, roadmaps of places like Malaysia and Madagascar, twine, and yellowed snapshots, I am also incapable of letting go—except under extreme duress—of bulkier items like odd chairs, dried palm fronds and pine cones including the bugs clinging thereunto, and—of course—books...
...they seduce me...
...Anyway, you have reached the point of no return...
...When I learned the alphabet, she brought home a copy of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass...
...Our library never closed...
...I cannot in good grace look askance at this lady...
...I have never heard her play although she is always on the verge of taking lessons to regain her lost "touch...
...That is how I was separated from a copy of the first edition in English translation of The Family Moskat...
...An absolutely splendid volume—the essence of the Talmud rendered clearly, concisely, simply...
...If a book is mine forever, I have forever to get to it...
...A succession of childhood illnesses delayed my schooling...
...If I hang in for a second paragraph, I can hardly catch myself from sliding into a cat nap...
...Books borrowed from public libraries open doors to other minds...
...One year, for example, a couple of dozen books came ava-lanching down from a top shelf onto her head...
...The revolting taxpayers may yet drive me back, willy nilly, to my private preserve...
...Even today it is much more than a book depository...
...I took perverse pleasure in ploughing through yards of pithy though ponderous prose to the point of exhaustion, then unexpectedly falling into the felicity of "Little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth...
...At this point I begin flinging books away without even a glance at their titles—old books, books with pages still uncut, books that I love passionately...
...It is comparatively easy for me to part with paperbacks with which I have developed no intimacy, or textbooks with the utilitarian ugliness of John Masefield's tramp steamers in Cargoes...
...They always suggested to me the self-consciously sensible black brograns which used to peep out from nuns' habits until Vatican II decided that bleak austerity was not the greatest religious virtue...
...If I still persist in being pokey, John Wayne's dybbuk enters into her and commands me in awesome stentorian tones, "Move them out now...
...The victory for Proposition Thirteen in California last year gave me a scare...
...Every day she polishes the piano mirror-bright...
...That was a long time ago...
...Here were all the perplexities,of my own fretful adolescence transmuted into poetry...
...Eventually Miriam begins to dig figurative spurs into my flanks...
...My obedience was rewarded with, "Now hurry on to page 125...
...In his career as a physician, he must have prescribed thousands of soporifics, but he surely never intended that his books should serve the same purpose...
...It is, I confess, a guilty love...
...I may also wind up the cultural attache to the American embassy at Kuala Lumpur...
...I marvel over the vast number of books I provided with healthy circulation so long as the New York Public Library alerted me to time as a finite entity...
...Because I know my own thinking reasonably well, other people's reactions are far more intriguing to me...
...Apparently I was...
Vol. 4 • March 1979 • No. 4
