Loud Books
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
Loud books end up the same place as the quiet ones do, on the back bookshelves, their spines showing and their glorious covers pressed front to back. William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, the book he wrote on a wandering soul, wandering the country, sits softly in the book stacks. The dust jacket has been torn away and the mauve shell beneath it is as plain as the 100 year-old books with gold-flecked lettering. This book, from the looks of it, is passive and old fashioned, some rustic words pressed together in plain type, but the thoughts it contains about the nation at that time and the direction the culture had taken were ear-piercing.
This is the travel book section at the central branch of the Olathe Public Library, 917.3, a few shelves from the biographies and the same distance from history where, gauging by the titles, the Civil War seems to be the most prevalent subject. I came seeking Least Heat Moon and found Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, Kerault, McMurtry (crotchedy and condescending), all great American commentators seeking to find themselves or America on the road. Kerouac is over in fiction. The roads are not to be heard, neither are the engine’s reving, the breaks sounding, wind blowing in through the windos, no voices that they encountered, and yet what can be heard are the casual conversations among the libray staff, the clearing throats, the rolling book sorters, the conversations at the check out counter and the greeter’s desk. The answers to the world are here in hushed books, the commentray of the living on life and on death and romance and sex, here, sex explored in the erotic sense and at the clinical level, with impassioned words and cold medical ones, in beautiful illustration and cold diagrams.
The images and voices are silenced until they come down from the shelves and the words pour out. Then highways and backroads become visible, the coffee shops and cafes. I am tempted to drive off into the curving road, let it carry me where it may, but my gas light has come on and I owe on the car. Payment is due today. I still feel that the trip I might take could free me to write and pay off the bills forever.
Men and women who are not saints – and who in fact are the furthest from it – become them in the high-ceiling library in February, hiding from the 20-degree cold with the other regular citizens, all the real places in these books imagined and running through the mind with motion and in still shots. Loud books on the shelves, shrewd chords filling up the work space, romance and western, let me get better, let me find myself in someone else’s travels so that I might find my own journey.
