the letters of our lives
The Read
“You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the Lord swore to your fathers to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth." (ESV)
Deuteronomy 11:18-21
The Run
The above passage is written to a community that is entering into God’s promises. God is setting a nation on a journey that will last beyond the lifetimes of those being addressed by Moses’ words directly. They will be addressed by these words again and again through the written text of Moses’ spoken words. A scroll of these words would later reside in Solomon’s temple. But God does not want families to wait until this structure is finished, he wants the text to surround homes, envisioning walls covered with the text. He wants parents to repeat the text not just for themselves but so that their children will know the words that were important to their parents and grandparents and to, in turn, have something to pass on to the next generation.
The families who have these texts on their walls didn’t write them. They just received them. They were to curate these ideas, live them out, and pass them on. Their children and their grandchildren would learn not only of God but of the parents that had gone before them, getting a glimpse into the lives they led.
Unpacking in my own home today, I found myself surrounded by stacks of old New Yorkers and novels I bought in my 20's. As George slept and I began putting these things on shelves, I couldn’t help but read a few articles that caught my eye. One was a personal history, "Stories End: Writing a Mother's Death," published in the March 7, 2011 issue of the New Yorker, by Meghan O’Rourke. In her final paragraph, she writes:
“Walking through the West Village, I saw on a sidewalk bookseller’s table a cheap paperback copy of a novel my mom had given me when I was a teen-ager – a novel that, she told me, had meant a lot to her. I bought it and read it that night, feeling that I was learning something new about both myself and her, since she had loved that novel, with its story of a young Irish-Catholic woman struggling to understand herself. I would always look for clues to her in books and poems, I realized. I would always search for echoes of the lost person…”
I had been thinking this week about the idea of writing a letter to George, somehow explaining myself to this tiny boy or to his future self. What I would exactly say or sum up I am not certain. I doubt such a letter could contain all of the thoughts or feelings I would wish to communicate. What O’Rourke says so beautifully, is that she experiences her deceased mother through the artifacts of her life. I say “experience” here because it is more than “remembering,” it is learning anew. She is perhaps making new memories of her mother. What did this book make her think? What did it make her feel? In searching for clues about her mother, she also investigates herself, fitting together new memories alongside the old.
In the same way that a book speaks on behalf of O’Rourke’s mother, I wonder what our collections, our libraries as small or large as they may be, will one day say about us? James Wood reflects on packing up his father–in-law’s library upon his death (“Shelf Life” published in the November 7, 2011 New Yorker). He first bemoans the burden placed on him to find new homes for the vast collection’s books. But ultimately the books confront him with a new understanding of a man that who was “hard to love, easier to admire.” He writes, “Libraries are always paradoxical: they are as personal as the collector and at the same time are an ideal statement of knowledge that is impersonal, because it is universal, abstract, and so much larger than an individual life.” Although in life Wood experienced his father-in-law as emotionally distant, in death his library gave an elegy for a man who was geographically distant. The shelves were filled memories of a “nomadic childhood” spent in Istanbul, Salonica, Beirut and Algiers. For his father-in-law, “the acquisition of a book signaled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place.” This library was a testament to a man who was longing for home: “he acquired books, as if he were putting on layers of clothing to protect against the drafts of exile.”
Libraries reveal not only the important memories of their curator, but also the the direction and organization of their thought. The French philosopher Elisabeth Badinter says of herself that "she lived in two centuries and commuted between them, a reluctant tenant in her own” (in a profile written by Jane Kramer in the July 25, 2011 New Yorker). Her two libraries reflect this separation: Her feminist library lives in Paris while her eighteenth-century library, which is “much bigger and more inspiring,” lives in her country home, where she also likes to write. The exactness of her collection mirrors her life in many ways. The texts with which you surround yourself have the power to create a world. They have a transformative power on your environment. The texts themselves become agents of change, vocal witnesses to your day-to-day thoughts. This gives insight into Deuteronomy 11:18-21. The passage declares: “surround yourself with these texts and they will transform your life, your relationships and your choices.” So, too, the experience of Badinter: she finds herself thinking in a liberated way in the city and a cultivated way when in the country. Her books are not just furniture; they are companions and advisors on her journey.
While I do not own an entire library (or two, for that matter) I will confess that I am well on my way. I don’t know what the collection would tell of my life, or how someone might interpret my smattering of books and journals that I picked from the used-book stores that chaperoned my 20’s. But there are several books that, like O’Rourke, might somehow explain myself to my son. I remember when I first moved to New York and worked long days that ended with long subway rides home. There was a moment on my walk when I could either climb up to my apartment, have dinner and go to bed, or I could push for another 30 minutes and sit by the East River. I would often choose the latter. My first several months in New York, I read and re-read the Unbearable Lightness of Being by the Czech author Milan Kundera. The book explores characters living through the Prague Spring of 1968. Rather than accepting Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, the author posits that each person has only one life to live. It will occur only once and never again: the “lightness of being.” He writes, “we live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.” I felt that in New York. Each day was new and unique and its memories reverberated at dusk on that bench overlooking the East River. I read my Bible, I read my New Yorker, I read many things, but the book I always had with me was Kundera’s. The text was a friend with whom to dissect the day. My favorite character, Tereza, loved her books:
“In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.”
Like Tereza, our books hold for us so many things. We didn’t write them but we own them. And we aren’t their singular owners, either. Each text on my shelf was printed tens of thousands of times and belongs also on the shelves of strangers I will never meet. They are doorways through which we see the world outside of us and windows through which others can glimpse the worlds inside of us. What do our books say about us? What memories will they conjure for those who hold them when we are gone?
If I were to be gone tomorrow George would have something of me in my books. In a way they are borrowed letters written to him that he will have to interpret one day. Maybe he will be walking by a used-book store, recognize a cover from the shelves of his childhood and pick it up. Maybe he will one day dismantle my library (now “our” library,” as both my husband David and I have married our collections) and learn something new about his mother and her thought life.
Even more than thinking about a time when I am gone, I think now about each moment I encounter and the person I continue to become. I am here now, reading, thinking, engaging in the books I love. Reading, then, is my way of writing a life-long letter to those whom I love.
This returns us to the wisdom of Deuteronomy 11. The texts with which we surround ourselves and to which we commit our lives are portals to relationships that transcend geography and generations.
My Bible looks like a single book, but it is actually an entire library. Sixty-six separate volumes, collected, edited and organized by centuries of ancient librarians, scholars and ordinary families just like mine. I will never know their names. They did not know mine. And yet this library connects me to their thoughts in the way, perhaps, George will be connected to mine in the library I will leave him.
