055 - Sanctuaries of Time

The personal library as a memoir

Oct 23, 2022

Certain aspects of books lie outside of their form. Their role in one’s library is one amongst them. In this late evening issue of Bombay Daak, we explore its role as a record of who we were and what we desired to be in this world.

When you organise your bookshelf chronologically, as opposed to other interesting, rational or scientific ways of arrangement, you make it more personal. You make a map of your life's journey. The library isn't then meant for someone else to make sense or use of, but for you to reconcile with your own path — where you came from, where you head next. It chronicles time, like a memoir, a sanctuary of your time in the world, a record of who you were, what were your curiosities, what you went through, who held you…

To Walk Into a Library

Last year, I began Season 2 of these letters elsewhere. Rohini, from Alipore Post had started the This is My Newsletter project, and invited me to write one issue. I wrote about my library. And I wrote -

To walk by my library is to see the world turn. My world view altered and to see the world from a distance as it makes its way through seasons, diminished and clouded one moment, stretching its seams under the sun the next. Malleable and liquid it flows the way rivers do from one genre to another, always taking a page with it, silting yet another with new words, yet contained within its banks.

When books are clubbed the way they entered your life, and if you like me like to read more than one at a time, you see ideas and thoughts from them merge, paving new pathways in your brain, new perspectives and views emerge as if by magic. And when you look back at them as a bunch, they all revive back together like a one single memory.

It is paradoxical to get things lost in a library. But a library organised in counts of time is not really organised.

Many months ago, inspired by the deluge stoicism recommended by YouTube, my sister asked me if she can have my copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. I went through the pile of books crammed in to the top three shelves but I didn't find it. I told her I gifted it to a friend (I couldn't remember who). Weeks later, as I move books from shelf to the other I find it lying below my copy of Goat Days. I hope no friend is waiting for it.

Libraries of Writers

Anka Muhlstein is the author of many books, most recently “Monsieur Proust’s Library.” Here she writes about the books that influenced Proust.

…my husband decided in a fit of who knows what lunatic O.C.D. to organize the books in our summer house by color, an odd move when you consider that both our sons are colorblind. The result has been that between the months of June and August, I have no idea where anything is, and am forced to just buy a second copy of any book I want to reread.

— Ayelet Waldman

Like the librarians of Babel in Borges’ story, who are looking for the book that will provide them with the key to all the others, we oscillate between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable. In the name of completeness, we would like to believe that a unique order exists that would enable us to accede to knowledge all in one go; in the name of the unattainable, we would like to think that order and disorder are in fact the same word, denoting pure chance.

— Georges Perec’s beautiful note on organising books can’t be captured in one excerpt, but here is one nevertheless.

“Some books are just crap and have to be thrown out. But some crappy books remind you of certain times in your life and have to be kept. In the closet.”
— Gary Shteyngart

The news of Liddell’s discovery quickly spread through Facebook and Twitter’s literary districts, and Markson’s fans realized that his personal library, about 2,500 books in all, had been sold off and was now anonymously scattered throughout The Strand, the vast Manhattan bookstore where Liddell had bought her book. And that’s when something remarkable happened: Markson’s fans began trying to reassemble his books.

- The strange afterlife of authors’ book collections

Walker's house was constructed specifically to accommodate his massive library. To create the space, which was constructed in 2002, Walker and architect Mark Finlay first built a 7-foot-long model. Then they used miniature cameras to help visualize what it would be like to move around inside. In a conscious nod to M. C. Escher (whose graphics are echoed in the wood tiling), the labyrinthine platforms seem to float in space, an illusion amplified by the glass-paneled bridges connecting the platforms.

- Nothing quite prepares you for the culture shock of Jay Walker's library

A friend of my father was home once visiting. He asked me if I read and I said yes, and we both went through my collection. He picked up a book and asked if he can take it with him. I said yes and then he gave me a sentence long sermon - never give your books to anyone!

I don’t consider that advice as bad.

Taking books out of one then feels an act of violence. The question to ask when you give a book away is - what did it say about you? What past are you censoring? What part of you are you cutting away?

When you consider Library in this manner it can be a great reliever of burden. You don’t carry the guilt of all the unread books hoarded, they are now choices waiting for their time to arrive. They are the future you. Even if time will never permit you to get around them, they still hold your aspirations, your hopes, dreams… your fears.