My family hid things in bookshelves. In between the straight white rows of World Book Encyclopedia and the navy blue accumulation of Reader’s Digest Book of the Month, I would find valuable letters, keepsakes, and occasionally a small stash of cash. The bookshelf became my parent’s way of thumbing their nose at the Great Depression. In their mind, banks weren’t safe, bonds and gold fluctuated, and home values were slow to climb. Not to mention that a mattress was about as safe a camouflage as my generation’s Fake-Rock-Hide-a-Key. But, with the fumes of the Depression still burning, a bookshelf became a place to hide money and supply a sense of security in a time of crisis. As a child who escaped such financial hardship, I had no idea what an emergency might resemble, but I assumed it would have something to do with the Russians, as everything did back then.
As I sit here tonight I am reminded of a comment made one evening by a man while skeptically surveying a bookshelf at a mutual friend’s home. When our host stepped from the room, the man shook his head, fingered the vast array of literature on the shelves and then said in disgust, “What a damn self-congratulatory collection!” It was tossed out like a grenade in a densely populated foxhole. The statement infuriated me. That my friend would compile books to express pompous elitism, a need to tote an academic snobbery into a living space in order to convince visitors of complexity, smacked of blatant envy. And then I thought about my own bookshelf and how it remains a sanctuary to the written page and occupies a vast and varied gangly bunch of characters…some of my favorite people.
I know this probably sounds odd to those who crave speech and flesh to warm the human experience, but there is something quite wonderful about looking at a bookshelf and realizing all the places it has taken you, the minds it has explored, the freedom and escape it has offered. Bound in each novel is a journey of tales, a lifelong search for the purpose of life as seen through the eyes of so many, through years and visions, mishap and tribulation. When I finish a new book I feel as though I’ve walked their path and set about in my own shoes to find more. To breathe through their lungs, waddle carefree into childhood follies, and wander in their tired old bones, until they are completely spent. We must then choose to use our own minds and hopefully pick up the torch of these soul bearers, the searchers of truth, who had the guts and wisdom to look at the world and dissect it for our capture… until we are ready to let it go. They have left the ripe fruits of labor on that “self-congratulatory shelf” for us to contemplate.
As a kid I used to wonder what happened to old books that had lost their audience. Did they make one final cough, sputter, and drop into a deep dark hole of fermenting alphabet soup? Did those old souls become kindling during long winter months? Books are my friends, my companions in sorrow, joy and release. I realize that in my need for space, my Kindle has given me that false sense of security. I can download in seconds, the cost is minimal, and if I remember to charge the battery, it will probably last longer than my old ticker. That being said, let me remain true to those printed jewels and the smell and feel of the pages. More importantly, let me never forget the dream to see my book published and upon my own humble bookshelf.
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