Book Shelves
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
Confined to an orderly existence, nothing about books arranged on shelves shows how provocative the ideas inside them can be. So I keep mine on-the-go because I see them for the motion and fluidity of the material they contain, not as energy trapped in squiggles on margined pages.
I carry great literary works in my gym bag. I don’t intend any disrespect to the writers, most of whom are dead. The words are just easier to find when I need to the motivation to keep at it with my own work. Between Pall Molls and whiskies, I doubt Vonnegut or Bukowski would have cared that I sometimes carry their works with me layered in dirty clothes. I also stuff them into my overhead compartment at work, on closet shelves, under chairs and the nominal bed stand. Lining them up on shelves doesn’t do them justice.
Some of my best writing flourishes have come on the backs of register receipts, sticky notes, notebook covers and I keep those bits as tokens that moments of inspiration can and do strike. So why not other writers’ words be treated so brazenly? On my reading list (in the gym bag) at the moment: Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine.
Last Wednesday at lunch, I found a place in the grass by a lake and found myself wading in creeks, my feet bitten by rocks, my arms snagged by tree limbs, then lying down behind a weed tuft on a hillside looking out for my friends attacking in a toy gun shootout. These moments were sparked from another man’s memory from a summer 80 years ago.
The boy in Bradbury’s story is Douglas Spaulding, but his memories belong to the author. Douglas’ quest, at the beginning, is to realize he’s alive. He asks his brother if he knows he’s alive, and he says he does. But then Douglas asks him again … does he really know? Can he really sense the world? Does he understand how fragile it is?
Most people don’t pay attention until the moment passes or until world lets us down (or we let ourselves down). Writers and artists are in those moments. I’ve been paying a great deal of attention in my life lately – the little circles of life that swirl overhead like tornadoes in lake tops and eventually descend and spin my world apart as well as that of my children.
I remember the first morning of my best summer, in 1984. I woke up early. I was out on the hillside behind my house. I laid in the dirt in a draw and let it turn the ground and my skin warm. While I read similar descriptions in Bradbury’s book, it took me back to a moment early last week when I woke up in the sun. The blinds were lifted eight inches or so from the window ledge so a perfect square shown on the lump in the bed. I’d left the window open overnight, the first time this spring. A summer feeling was blowing in through the screen and the carpet was warm for the toes. The room was still and I my skin felt warm, not the chill it holds in arms that protrude from under the sheets. In a few days, it will be the unofficial start to the summer – Memorial Day weekend. I enjoyed every second of it. And my books stayed in their places.
There is no other time of the year as good to read Bradbury. I had this weird idea in college that if I printed out my work and carried it inside a book that I liked, something magical might rub off on it. Whether it can spread from book to loose paper is not likely, but There Is something magical inside it: brilliant description that tastes like summer. Where the books are stored has little to do with the places the words can take you and the memories that can be stirred.
