A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  Another book, which is also a library, but in a different way, George Saintsbury’s A History of English Prose Rhythm, provides testimony concerning what happens when the guest is taken to a hostelry of transformatory power such as Ben Jonson’s inn is: “… the selection, coadaptation, and application of the borrowed phrases to express Ben’s views constitute a work more really original than most utterances that are guiltless of literature”.

  In setting down the provenance of my copy of Discoveries, I have also done the same for the following sentence, which I put a faint marginal line beside while researching opinions about metaphor for my dissertation (now, thank God, a distant memory); it is a sentence that (having served in several capacities since) I know quite by heart, and treasure, inasmuch as it is as personal and particular to me now as its book is, having absorbed so much of myself, like the paper wrapped around fish and chips. “What a deale of cold busines doth a man mis-spend the better part of life in! in scattering complements, tendring visits, gathering and venting newes, following Feasts and Playes, making a little winter-love in a darke corner.”

  We shall not understand what a book is, and why a book has the value many persons have, and is even less replaceable than a person, if we forget how important to it is its body, the building that has been built to hold its lines of language safely together through many adventures and a long time. We have only to examine how we feel about books we own and books we borrow to begin to appreciate the character of its companionship, or consider our relation to those same texts when they’ve been inscribed on discs and are brought up on a screen like a miniature movie. The only thing that made returning books tolerable to me was my ability to borrow more.

  However, words on a disc have absolutely no permanence, and unless my delete key is disarmed, I can invade our Pledge of Allegiance, without a trace of my intrusion, to replace its lines with mine: I hedge my allegiance to the United States of America and the Republic for which it stands … Erasure, correction, and replacement is almost too easy.

  Words on a disc have visual qualities, to be sure, and these darkly limn their shape (I can see them appearing right now as I type), but they have no materiality, they are only shadows, and when the light shifts, they’ll be gone. Off the screen, they do not exist as words. They do not wait to be reseen, reread; they wait only to be remade, relit. I cannot carry them beneath a tree or onto a side porch; I cannot argue in their margins; I cannot enjoy the memory of my dismay when, perhaps after years, I return to my treasured copy of Treasure Island and find the jam I inadvertently smeared there still spotting a page precisely at the place where Billy Bones chases Black Dog out of the Admiral Benbow with a volley of oaths, and where his cutlass misses its mark to notch the inn’s wide sign instead.

  My copy, which I still possess, was of the cheapest. Published by M. A. Donahue & Co. of Chicago, it bears no date, and its coarse pages are jaundiced and brittle, yet they’ve outlived their manufacturer; they will outlive their reader—always comforting, although a bit sad. The pages, in fact, smell their age, their decrepitude, and the jam smear is like an ancient bruise; but as well as Marcel did by means of his madeleine, like a scar recalling its accident, I remember the pounding in my chest when the black spot was pressed into Billy Bones’s palm, and Blind Pew appeared on the road in a passage that I knew even then was a piece of exemplary prose. It was not only my book in my hands I had, as I sat on the porch steps with a slice of bread and jam; it was the road to the inn, Billy Bones in his bed, the mark on the sign, which—it didn’t surprise me—was still there after all those years.

  That book and I loved each other, and I don’t mean just its text: that book, which then was new, its cover slick and shiny, its paper agleam with the tossing sea, and armed as Long John Silver was, for a fight, its binding tight as the elastic of new underwear, not slack as it is now, after so many openings and closings, so many dry years; that book would be borne off to my room, where it lived through my high school miseries in a dime-store bookcase, and it would accompany me to college, too, and be packed in the duffel bag I carried as a sailor. Its body may have been cheaply made by machine, and there may have been many copies of this edition printed, but the entire press run has by this time been dispersed, destroyed, the book’s function reduced to its role as my old school chum, whom I see at an occasional reunion, along with editions of Malory and Mann, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Hardy and Spengler, gloomy friends of my gloomy youth. Each copy went forth into bookstores to seek a purchaser it would make fortunate, and each has had its history of success or failure since, years of standing among rarity and leather, say, when suddenly, after widowhood and a week of weeping that floods the library, it finds itself in some secondhand ghetto, dumped for a pittance by customarily callous heirs into a crowd of those said, like cars, to have been “previously owned.”

  We all love the “previously owned.” We rescue them like orphans from their Dickensian dismay. I first hold the volume upside down and give its fanned-out pages a good ruffle, as if I were shaking fruit from a tree: Out will fall toothpicks and hairpins, calling cards and bits of scrap paper, the well-pressed envelope for a stick of Doublemint gum, a carefully folded obituary of the book’s author, the newsprint having acidulously shadowed its containing pages, or, now and then, a message, interred in the text, as I had flutter from a volume once owned by Arthur Holly Compton (and sold to me by the library of his own university). It was the rough draft of a telegram to the general in charge of our occupation troops in Germany, requesting the immediate dispatch of Werner Heisenberg to the United States.

  Should we put these feelings for the object and its vicissitudes down to simple sentimental nostalgia? To our commonly assumed resistance to change? I think not; but even as a stimulus for reminiscence, a treasured book is more important than a dance card, or the photo that freezes you in midteeter at the edge of the Grand Canyon, because such a book can be a significant event in the history of your reading, and your reading (provided you are significant) should be an essential segment of your character and your life. Unlike the love we’ve made or meals we’ve eaten, books congregate to form a record around us of what they’ve fed our stomachs or our brains. These are not a hunter’s trophies, but the living animals themselves. In this country, we are losing, if we have not lost, any appreciation for what we might call “an intellectual environment.” Even when the rich included a library in their mansion plans, it was mostly for show, a display of purchased taste that is now no longer necessary.

  In the ideal logotopia, every person would possess their own library, and add at least weekly, if not daily, to it. The walls of each home would seem made of books—wherever one looked, one would see only spines; because every real book (as opposed to dictionaries, almanacs, and other compilations) is a mind, an imagination, a consciousness. Together, they comprise a civilization, or even several. However, utopias have the bad habit of hiding in their hearts those schemes for success, those requirements of power, rules concerning conduct, which someone will one day have to carry forward, employ, and enforce in order to achieve them, and, afterward, to maintain the continued purity of their Being. Books have taught me what true dominion, what right rule is: It is like the freely given assent and labor of the reader who will dream the dreams of the deserving page and expect no more fee than the reward of its words.

  I have only to reach out, as I frequently do, to cant a copy of Urne Buriall from its shelf, often after a day of lousy local prose, and to open it at random, as though it were the Bible and I was seeking guidance, just to hear again the real rich thing speak forth as fresh as if it were a fountain:

  While some have studied Monuments, others have studiously declined them: and some have been so vainly boisterous, that they durst not acknowledge their Graves; wherein Alaricus seems most subtle, who had a River turned to hide his bones at the bottome. Even Sylla that thought himself safe in his Urne, could not prevent revenging tongues, and stones thrown at his Monument. Happy
are they whom privacy makes innocent, who deal so with men in this world, that they are not afraid to meet them in the next, who when they dye, make no commotion among the dead, and are not toucht with that poeticall taunt of Isaiah. (Selected Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

  What poetical taunt? In chapter 14, Sir Thomas tells us, Isaiah taunts the vainglorious with vainglory. Look it up.

  In the past, most people could. At one time, for many in this country, the Bible was their “Five Foot Shelf.” And the “Five Foot Shelf” was their library. A few of us are fortunate enough to live in logotopia, to own our own library, but for many, this is not possible, and for them there is a free and open public institution with a balanced collection of books that it cares for and loans, with stacks where a visitor may wander, browse, and make discoveries; such an institution empowers its public as few do. In fact, it has no rival, for the books in the public library are the books that may take temporary residence in yours or mine. We share their wealth the way we share the space of a public park. And the benefits include the education of the body politic, an education upon which the success of democracy depends, and one that is largely missing from the thrill-seeking, gossipmongering, and mindless masses who have been content to place their governing, as well as their values, faiths, and future plans, in the hands of the crudest commercial interests. The myths that moved us to worship in ways preferred and planned by the Church, or to feel about things in a manner that served the interests of the state, have less power over our souls now than the latest sale of shoes, which promise, through the glory of their names, the pleasures of sex and health and social rank, and give new meaning to the old expression “leap of faith.”

  My high school had no library worthy of the name “book,” so I would walk about a mile downtown to the public one to borrow, in almost every case, a new world. That’s what a library does for its patrons. It extends the self. It is pure empowerment. I would gather my three or four choices, after deliberations governed by ignorant conjecture, and then, before leaving, I would sit at one of the long, wide tables we associate with the institution now, and read a page or two further than I had while standing in the stacks. I scorned the books deemed appropriate for my age, and selected only those I wouldn’t understand. Reading what I didn’t understand was, for one blissful period of my life, the source of a profound, if perverse, pleasure. I also liked to look at the card pasted in the back of the book to record previous borrowings—a card that is, like so much other information, there no longer or discreetly incomplete. It gave me a good deal of satisfaction to be taking home some rarely read, symbolically dusty, arcane tome. I checked out both my books and my pride at the same desk. See O world what I am reading and be amazed: Joyce, Wells, Carlyle. Well, Wells I could understand. That, I would realize later, was what was the matter with him.

  And the Saturday that Ulysses was denied me because my ears were too young to hear its honesty was a large red-letter day, burned upon my symbolic bosom wherever it was then kept, for on that day I learned what righteous indignation was; I realized what libraries were really for, just in the moment my own was failing its function, because my vanity was ready for Ulysses even if my mind wasn’t. I also felt the special pleasure produced by victimization. I left the building in an exultant huff.

  Libraries have succumbed to the same pressures that have overwhelmed the basic cultural functions of museums and universities, aims which should remain what they were, not because the old ways are always better, but because in this case they were the right ones: the sustaining of standards, the preservation of quality, the conservation of literacy’s history, the education of the heart, eye, and mind—so that now they devote far too much of their restricted space, and their limited budget, to public amusement, and to futile competition with the Internet. It is a fact of philistine life that amusement is where the money is: Finally, you are doing something for the community, spokesmen for the community say, saluting the librarian with a gesture suitable to a noble Roman without, however, rising from their bed of banality.

  Universities attract students by promising them, on behalf of their parents, a happy present and a comfortable future, and these intentions are passed along through the system like salmonella until budgets are cut, research requirements are skimped, and the fundamental formula for academic excellence is ignored, if not forgotten. That formula is: A great library will attract a great faculty, and a great faculty will lure good students to its log; good students will go forth and win renown, endowments will increase, and so will the quality of the football team, until original aims are lost sight of, academic efforts slacken, the library stands neglected, the finer faculty slip away, good students no longer seek such an environment, and the team gets even better.

  The sciences, it is alleged, no longer use books, neither do the professions, since what everyone needs is data, data day and night, because data, like drugs, soothe the senses, and encourage us to think we are, when at the peak of their heap, on top of the world.

  Of course libraries contain books, and books contain information, but information has always been of minor importance, except to minor minds. The information highway has no destination, and the sense of travel it provides is pure illusion. What matters is how the information is arranged, how it is understood, and to what uses it is going to be put. In short, what matters is the book the data’s in. I just employed the expression “It is a fact of philistine life …” That is exactly what the philistine would like the library to retrieve for it. Just the facts, ma’am. Because facts can be drawn from the jaws of some system like teeth; because facts are goods like shoes and shirts and … well, books. This week, the library is having a closeout sale on facts about deserts. Get yours now. Gobi will be gone soon, the Sahara to follow.

  The popular description of the Internet is misguided. No one should be surprised about that. “Misinformation alley” is a more apt designation, although it is lined with billboards called “Web sites,” obscuring whatever might be seen from the road. Moreover, “highway” has the advantage of reminding us of another technological marvel, the motorcar, and of all its accomplishments: the death of millions around the world, the destruction of the landscape, the greedy irresponsible consumption of natural resources, the choking of cities and the poisoning of the atmosphere, the ruination of the railroads, the distribution of noise into every sort of solitude, the creation of suburbs and urban sprawl, of malls and motor homes, of consumerist attitudes and the dangerous delusions that afflict drivers, the tyranny of highways and tollways in particular, the creation of the road-borne tourist, who drives, who looks, who does not see, but nevertheless clearly remembers “having been there.” In short, blessings may be blessings, but they are invariably mixed.

  Frequently, one comes across comparisons of the electronic revolution with that of writing and printing, and these are usually accompanied by warnings to those suspicious of technology that objections to these forward marches are both fuddy-duddy and futile. But Plato’s worries that writing would not reveal the writer the way the soul of a speaker was exposed; that spontaneity would be compromised; that words would be stolen (as Phaedrus is about to steal them in that profound, beautifully written dialogue), and words would be put in other mouths than those of their authors; that writing does not hear its reader’s response; that lying, hypocrisy, false borrowing, ghostwriting would increase so that the hollow heads of state would echo with hired words; and that, oddly, the advantages and powers of the book would give power and advantage to the rich, who would learn to read, and would have the funds to acquire and keep such precious volumes safe: These fears were overwhelmingly realized.

  The advent of printing was opposed (as writing was) for a number of mean and self-serving reasons, but the fear that it would lead to the making of a million half-baked brains, and cause the illicit turning of a multitude of untrained heads, as a consequence of the unhindered spread of nonsense, was a fear that was also well founded. The b
oast that the placement of books in many hands would finally overthrow superstition was not entirely a hollow hope, however. The gift gave a million minds a chance at independence.

  It was the invention of photography, I remember, that was supposed to run painters out of business. What it did, of course, was make artists out of them, not grandiose or sentimental describers. And the pixilation of pictures has rendered their always-dubious veracity as unbelievable as any other shill for a system. If blessings are mixed, so are calamities. I note also that, although the horse-drawn coach or wagon nowadays carries rubes in a circle around Central Park, there are more horses alive and well in the world than there ever were.

  So will there be books. And if readers shut their minds down the better to stare at pictures which rarely explain themselves, and if readers abandon reading to swivel-hip their way through the inter-bunk, picking up scraps of juicy data here and there, downloading this or that picture to be stared at, and rambling on in their E-mails with that new fashion of grammatical decay, the result will be to make real readers, then chief among the last who are left with an ability to reason, rulers. Books made the rich richer. Books will make the smart smarter.

  Because books are like bicycles: You travel under your own power and proceed at your own pace, your riding is silent and will not pollute, no one is endangered by your journey—not frightened, maimed, or killed—and the exercise is good for you.

  Books in libraries, however awful some of them assuredly are, have been screened by editors who have a stake in their quality and their success. Once on shelves, they may receive from readers the neglect they deserve. But at the end of all those digital delivery channels thrives a multitude of pips whose continuous squeaking has created static both loud and distressing. Among the sound of a million pop-offs, how shall we hear and identify a good thought when it pops out?