Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” Groucho Marx
Over my left shoulder rests a small collection of books mostly scavenged from second-hand shops. They stand, unassumingly, out of the way until I need a reminder of something: on war in “For Whom The Bell Tolls”, or slavery and racism in “To Kill a Mockingbird”, or the sameness of belligerents in “Life and Fate”, or the immensity and imperfection of existence in “Nausea”, or the many wonderful lessons of Dr. Seuss, or simply of how far and difficult and dangerous and tiring to the soul the first voyages to the New World have been in the “Star of the Sea” and how important it was to set out on that voyage — despite the sea’s voracious tendency to rise up and swallow the sail, the mast, the crew, the passengers, and the whole ship until there’s nothing left, not even a little foam on the surface.
Books are a great source of joy to me. They offer guidance and a way to learn about who and what we are, without necessarily always having to deep dive into interpersonal complexities. They are a source of knowledge, questions, answers, fresh new thoughts, shelter, understanding, and conversation. And at times they are a source of frustration: either by way of the quality of writing, or the staleness of their content, the disagreement they cause in me, or even just by how they’re printed.
More than just sources of knowledge, books are a reminder of everything I, on some level, have already known. It’s not so much that I learn something from them, as much as it is that they remind me of something I already, on some level, have known. Maybe it is a reminder on how to deal with a difficult period, a difficult person, or just a difficult me. Whenever a paragraph reveals some new nugget that adds to the mosaic of my knowledge, the revelation is almost always accompanied by a quiet acknowledgment:
I knew that. It makes sense, it cannot be any other way.
Books matter
Not in their binding, nor in the beauty of the cover, nor in the weight of the paper, but rather in their very essence — to serve as a repository of thoughts every single person has the liberty of creating. It’s the vibrant possibility of taking an interest in something, anything, and passing it on so that, eventually, someone else can come across it, read, absorb, and move on, purposefully or inadvertently sharing its ideas with someone else, somewhere else, with whom they might germinate.
“One must always be careful of books,” said Tessa, “and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.” Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel
We’ve all heard a thousand times not to judge the book by its cover and indeed we should hold fast to that advice. It’s not the cover that matters, nor so much the content, but rather that time a human being had invested into sharing her thoughts, saying:
Here, here are my thoughts, free for taking. Do with them as you please. Believe them or don’t. Just do remember that they offer a look into my mind, even though we might be thousands of miles or hundreds of years apart.
To look into the mind of another…it’s the stuff science fiction is made of. It’s the ultimate mystery — to know what people truly think of me or, were I a dictator, to know what people think in general so as to control them easier. And yet, I would imagine mind-reading to be overrated. Most of what my brain does during the day is pointless chatter, and I imagine it’s the same for everyone else. It’s difficult enough to manage one brain so having more of them available in the airwaves would likely drive us crazy.
But books…they’re different. They are a concentration of all the (hopefully) constructive thoughts the author had carefully gathered, made sense of, and let loose on sheets of paper. They are an argument, an idea, freely offered to the reader so that she can consider it and decide whether to venture into its territory.
In my mind, this is a legitimate superpower. To collect one’s thoughts, make sense of them, and to preserve them for the future generations, however many or few there will be. It’s a way, at least proverbially, to flip death a finger. To take it even further, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges, I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. I don’t know whether paradise exists or deserves a capital “P”, but I do understand his sentiment.
It makes me giddy to try imagining all the tomes of knowledge we’ve created over the years, books I have never seen but still have the opportunity to open and engage with. Whether what they claim is true or not, good or not, or of high quality or not, is almost beside the point. What’s important is that each of one of us can choose to walk these bridges to the minds of people who had created them, thus engaging with the thoughts they thought, no matter how long ago the passage of time had snuffed their candle.
Think about it. We’re able to, on some level, get to know every man who decided to wade through the clutter of his thoughts and write a coherent story for someone else to read. We’re able to converse with all those women who made up their mind to put down on paper what was before that real only to, and in, that same mind.
And that’s the whole point. Not reading, not even learning, but communication. Books provide a way to open wide the doors of our skulls where everything is often rote and the same. To step outside and into the feral, incomprehensible wilderness of another human’s mind, its seemingly unknowable fields and forests, where everything works differently and many things are frighteningly new, where our prejudices and assumptions fall under a barrage of new perspectives until, suddenly and maddeningly, the other person’s thinking begins to finally make sense.
And regardless of whether we agree in the end or don’t, whether we liked the story or didn’t, whether we thought it sublime or mundane: we are changed and there’s no going back. No matter how many times we give the book away, or burn it in the fires of collective madness, we are touched — not by the book itself, not even by its content, but by the presence of another human being living in its pages.
That is why books, even lousy ones, have my undying loyalty. My earliest memories are filled with colorful covers that hide the fables of Brothers Grimm, mysteries in Emil & Detectives, the layered wonders of The War of The Ring and Silmarillion, the spitefulness of the Catcher in the Rye, the first real questions in Der Steppenwolf, the first time I ran into lovemaking paragraphs in the Tribe of the Bear, and with so much more. I have read so many that many escape my memory, all the while being an escape in themselves. An escape from a world I considered dull, uninspiring, and toilsome. It had not crossed my mind back then that the world did not owe me inspiration, nor excitement, and that what prevented me from having both was — me. Through all of that books followed me, like ants their queen, and at every corner and every twist of the road I relied on having a book or two at hand to ease my frantic mind.
And I see now that what eased my mind wasn’t the book, nor the letters inked into them, but the simple connection I was able to, from my earliest days, form with the often deceased authors of the books I chose to read. Even though they were long lost behind the veil of death, the works they left behind allowed me to catch a glimpse of who they were, what they thought about, whom they loved, whom they pitied, what they knew, and what they thought they knew, and how it all related to the particular point in time in which I, by chance, picked up their book.
The book chooses you
They say that you don’t choose a book — the book chooses you because it’s what you need at the time. It’s a romanticized way of saying that we search for what we often think about. In that sense, stumbling upon a book that fits into the narrative of life is not all that strange. It’s like finding a romantic partner — you look for what you consciously or unconsciously want and then you learn, over time, if the new connection satisfies not just the wants (which are arbitrary and often wrong), but also the common needs we all share — love, safety, validation, care, empathy, and so on. The point is to see whether we can find someone whose life we can enrich, and by doing so enact an enriching of our own life.
In a strange way, finding the right book at the right time accomplishes the same kind of mutual enrichment. It enriches the reader and the book itself by yet another interpretation of its content, often far different from what the author had intended. More than just dumb stacks of paper, books carry seeds that are ever ready to flourish in the fruitful soil of its reader’s mind. They are bridges that allow the author and the reader to meet, to share a laugh or a cry, and to walk together for a little while until the book is over and closed and all that remains is the memory, the experience, and the foolish feeling that the author is, and has been, a lifelong friend — which is not all that foolish after all.
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” J. D. Salinger
Having said all this, it’s high time to crack open a book, wouldn’t you say?
Thanks for reading.
