‘One’s books are one’s biography’
The oldest book in my library was published in 1538. It is Sefer Hasidim, or The Book of the Pious, the first edition, from Bologna, of the vast trove of precepts and stories, at once severe and wild, of the Jewish pietists of Germany in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Next to it, and towering over it, which is as it should be, stands Moreh Nevuchim, or The Guide of the Perplexed, the handsome Bragadin edition from Venice in 1551. And next to Maimonides’s masterpiece stands the great 1669 edition of Thomas Browne, the Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Enquiries into very Many Received Tenents, and Commonly Presumed Truths, another sort of guide to perplexities, along with Urn-Burial and The Garden of Cyrus and their fine engravings of the urns and the quincunx. Nothing elevates a room more than the presence within it of objects whose significance is in no way derived from oneself. These things are not mine; I am theirs. (This can be true also of younger objects: further along the row of treasures is the exquisite first printing, in Boston in 1895, of The Black Riders and Other Lines by Stephen Crane, a small book with a black flower swirling like a vice on its front and its back, and an undistinguished copy of the Book of Job, published in Zhitomir in 1872, that I rescued from the trash in a ruined synagogue in Lvov, or more correctly Lemberg, which is the volume in the room that burns my fingers.) But really the oldest book in my library is a beat-up copy of The Portable Nietzsche—the edition with Seymour Chwast’s woodcut-like image of the master and his unfortunate moustache, not the later one that Oliver Stone anachronistically placed in the hands of Val Kilmer in one of the most risible scenes in The Doors—because it is the book that has been with me the longest. I bought it in 1969 for $1.95 at the Eighth Street Bookshop. I was taking an evening course on the pre-Socratics—I was a monster of voracity, even at seventeen and under a yarmulke—a few blocks away at the New School, and my masterful instructor, a certain Professor Jonas, urged me to read more philosophy, including Nietzsche. The dog-eared passages from Thus Spoke Zarathustra are embarrassing now (“Light am I; ah, that I were night!”), but then this was Nietzsche’s only book for adolescents. After some years I learned who Professor Jonas really was, and after some more years he and I enjoyed a warm laugh when I told him the story of his impact upon me in those Village evenings. But all the miles of shelves on all the walls of all the apartments and houses and offices in which I have lived and worked were erected on the foundation of that paperback, Viking Portable Library P62. This is the other variety of significance that attaches to books, the subjective sort, which transforms them into talismans. Many books are read but some books are lived, so that words and ideas lose their ethereality and become experiences, turning points in an insufficiently clarified existence, and thereby acquire the almost mystical (but also fallible) intimacy of memory. In this sense one’s books are one’s biography. This subjective urgency bears no relation to the quality of the book: lives have been changed by kitsch, too. What matters is that one’s pores be opened, and that the opening be true. “What is the Ninth Symphony,” Karl Kraus declared, “compared to a pop tune played by a hurdy-gurdy and a memory!”