Sexy Bedside
Aristotle’s famous declaration that “all men by
nature desire knowledge” is demonstrably untrue. Half
of this wreck we call civilization — the half that includes
poverty, taxes, religious, political, and ethical intolerance
— has been achieved by a steadfast retreat from knowledge,
by leaders who either cannot read (you know who I mean) or
choose not to. Of course, Adolf Hitler was well-read, but
in all the wrong ideas; he perverted Paul and Nietzsche and
drained from Wagner exactly what that weirdo was peddling:
moral decrepitude and mythic grandiosity. Mao, too, was well-read
enough to know that people who read are potent threats, and
so he slaughtered intellectuals and educators and damn near
everyone who ever touched a book.
The specters of Hitler and Mao notwithstanding, our current leaders would be better poised to lead if they had a bedside table that resembled my own. Or bedside area, really, since the hills of books I cannot stop buying have long ago filled the table, the mantle above the fireplace near the bed, and the floor space around the bed. These undulating piles of books would make me eligible for some fine leadership skills — if only I would read them. I have for some time now been a ravenous book-buyer and only a modest book-reader; the books I buy each week outnumber those I read by a ratio of three to one. John Updike has written about the numerous hours he spends shifting stacks of books from one shelf to another, from one corner to another, from one room to another. I find myself shifting, as well, and it has occurred to me that this is the reason I purchase so many books: not to read them, but merely to touch them.
This tactile sensation, the heft and scent and color of a book in our hands, is the reason the book will never perish under the autocratic rule of the internet. Every seer who predicted that the book will die by radio, by cinema, by TV, or by the net, was proven wrong and laughed at. We love books, even those of us who don’t really read too many of them; a book, like a bicycle, is a perfect invention, and we admire perfection even if we are stupid, the same way a baby will stare at a pretty face and ignore an ugly one.
I began buying unreasonable amounts of books at nineteen-years-old when I decided that I wanted to be a writer — with what other tools does a wanna-be writer surround himself if not books? A wanna-be musician can sit among guitars, amps, microphones, and keyboards, and feel very musician-like in that environment. If a writer wants to feel writer-like he must surround himself with something, since reams of papers and boxes of pencils won’t do. It took me about five or six years to stop buying so many books, and I stopped out of necessity: each year I moved to a new (usually smaller) apartment, and each year I had several hundred more pounds to carry up and down stairs. The books I had been buying were ridiculous anyway, books I never intended to read: Sartre’s multi-volume biography of Flaubert; mammoth biographies of Mahler, Brahms, Diderot, and Patton; incomprehensible studies of Heidegger; and above all, books on the history and philosophy of religion, since, as an old girlfriend once told me, I am a former Catholic obsessed with God in general and the suffering of Christ in particular.
By the time I was twenty-six I had accumulated close to two-thousand books and had absolutely nowhere to put them. Stacks of them went to bed with me. So not only did I stop buying them but I also managed to sell off about a third to used bookstores, at a considerable fiscal loss. And for the past five years I have mostly behaved myself and stopped hoarding books, or even buying the occasional study of those topics and figures I am intrigued by, topics and figures I have spent more than a decade studying: Greek tragedy, human evolution, Christianity, Eugene O’Neill, de Sade, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
So how do I explain this lapse now upon me, this return to amassing a ridiculous sum of books? The city of Boston is partly responsible: my employer, Boston University, gives me a ten percent discount at the Barnes & Nobel in Kenmore Square, and what’s more, Boston boasts one of the finest bookstores in the country, including Harvard Bookstore, Raven Used Books, Commonwealth Books, Brookline Booksmith, Brattle Book Shop, and Boston Book Annex. It remained relatively simple to refrain from buying books in suburban New Jersey, my home. But when I moved to Boston two years ago the fever came upon me again. I suppose the situation woulldn’t be so dire if I owned a spacious home and garnered a salary in the six digits, but neither of those is the case and, to boot, I’m up to my earlobes in debt — the dark reality of higher education in this country.
So what titles currently sit in foreboding stacks around my bed? The most interesting might actually get read sometime this year: The God of Ecstasy: Sex-Roles and the Madness of Dionysus by Arthur Evans; Mysteries of the Snake Goddess: Art, Desire, and the Forging of History by Kenneth Lapatin; Fingerprints: The Origins of Crime Detection and the Murder Case That Launched Forensic Science by Colin Beavan; Demonic Males: Apes and the Origin of Human Violence by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson; Ghosts of Venery: A Psycho-erotic Self-analysis by John Philip Lundin; The Mystery of the Tunguska Fireball by Surendra Verma; God or Beast: Evolution and Human Nature by Robert Claiborne; Catullus: A Poet in the Rome of Julius Caesar by Aubrey Burl. And those are just some of the nonfiction titles from the peaks of two stacks.
An example of how hysteria functions: after being captivated by two Wilkie Collins novels, The Moonstone and The Woman in White, I felt compelled to rush out and purchase not only every single Oxford paperback of Collins’s novels, but also every biography and critical study I could find. And there they sit now, to the left of the bed, gathering dust and stressing the floor beams. But at least when I bought the Collins collection I had half an intention of one day reading it, which is more than I can say for these titles, all of which I am certain I will never even peruse, never mind read: Witch Hunt: History of a Persecution by Nigel Cawthorne; The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher; The Secrets of Judas: The Story of the Misunderstood Disciple and His Lost Gospel by James Robinson; Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres by William T. Vollmann; and a massive tome by Joanna Bourke called Fear: A Cultural History. Again, those are chosen from just two stacks; there are six more stacks around the bed.
These piles of books offer comfort; maybe by some hocus pocus the wisdom in their pages will transport itself into my gray matter while I am asleep. They are also a promise — of happiness, of betterment. One turns to literature from a genuine fear of existence, which is one of the reasons why most of our leaders aren’t better read: they are too pompous and self-righteous to be afraid, to know that they do not have the answers to what ails humankind. And the preoccupation with power doesn’t allow one the time to be influenced by the compassion found in literature. Fiction, poetry, and drama put a person in better stead to lead himself. And because I don’t have the presumptuousness ever to lead the multitudes, leading myself is the best I can hope for.
