ALL THOSE BOOKS

ALL THOSE BOOKS

An Andrew Ramble

A few years ago I started asking myself a simple question.  This was it; “Why do I keep almost every book I read?”  It was getting out of hand.  I had stacks of books on shelves, in boxes, and even under my bed.  Now let me go back and preface this by saying that I am a reader, but I’m not what I would consider an avid reader.  This is to say that I probably knock off about a dozen books a year, give or take.  It’s amazing how even at this modest pace, just how quickly they accumulate.

The problem was amplified by the fact that people like to share books, especially if they know you enjoy reading.  They start telling me you MUST READ this or that, and being that I understand the personal and often intimate connection that grows between a reader and the page, I am hesitant to wave off these “shared books” or “gift books.”  It’s just bad form to do that, besides I would hate to hurt a fellow readers feelings that deeply.  So I ended up with a bunch of books from a bunch of writers that don’t interest me much, such as Robin Cook, James Patterson, and Tom Clancy.  I also ended up with a bunch of books from writers such as Michael Chabon or David Foster Wallace.  Writers I respect and would like to read, but I just can’t seem to follow.  I would like to think that my comprehension is unlimited, but a few sessions trying to cut through works like Wallace’s, Infinite Jest or Faulkners, The Sound and the Fury, quickly dispelled any illusions I previously had about my unlimited potential with regard to reading comprehension.

So, I did what I think many of us do with furnishings, trinkets, and toys that we tire of.  I got rid of them.  Some went to friends, some went to the public library, but most just went in the ole garbage can.  When I look at what is left I am struck by a realization.  The books that remain are not my favorite stories or my greatest reading accomplishments.   They are the books that I always grab off the shelf, shuffle through, and look for certain memorable passages, or as I like to think of them, brilliant flashes.  Passages that have stuck with me over the years and have saved the lives of these paperback masterpieces from being packed away for a garage sale or given away to people like myself who don’t really want them.  Most of the time these passages contain what I consider to be great writing.  Other times I have made some personal connection with what the author was saying and I continue to draw inspiration from their writing.  This is all very high minded, but the main thing that draws me into a passage it this; If I read it aloud, and it sounds really cool, then I’m hooked.

Every once in a while I reach over to my bedside bookshelf that now contains the few remnants of a once vast, often unread personal library, and I pull out one of these books.  Sitting on the edge of the bed, I sit and read the dog-eared page or the long ago underlined passage, and I continue to be amazed.  Maybe one or two of these writings has before, or will now, amaze you as well.  Or you just might be like me and only be occasionally interested in the literary likes of another.  Either way, please enjoy or ignore.

MOBY DICK, by Herman Melville

The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men fell eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.  That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; -Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it.  All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.  He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, by Kurt Vonnegut

I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction.  The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar, I read. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.

So it goes.

Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known.  The world was better off without them.

And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been.  But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

So she was turned to a pillar of salt.  So it goes.

ON THE ROAD, by Jack Kerouac

The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, it the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.  But who wants to die?

LORD JIM, by Joseph Conrad

He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from under stare which made you think of a charging bull.  His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it.  It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else.

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT, by Norman Maclean

“It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t.  Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening.  Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence faces to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.  The river was cut by the worlds great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time.  On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops.  Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

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