The first library sale in almost two years! I didn’t find any wish list treasures, but I found plenty of books I’m willing to try for two or three dollars. Some of the old crew was there — Muppet Man, Yuri and Svetlana, and Heroin Chic(k), among others. The last of these had a buddy with her who looks a lot like Wesley Yang. He, Muppet Man and I pondered how much respect anyone would have for the political and literary luminaries of the eighteenth century if they were our contemporaries in the age of social media. We agreed that Ben Franklin would probably be in trouble for sending dick pics to various women, Samuel Johnson would probably be furiously editing Wikipedia, and Boswell would be writing all about it for TMZ. It was good to be back.
so many books, so little time
The Edge of the World
I’d started coming to bookstores because I wanted to learn how to write and the only consistent advice I got from established writers was to read everything. It was good advice. It’s still good advice. It’s also impossible. No one reads everything, nor even all the books they’d like to. You make your choices, come what may.
Harvard economist Alexander Gerschenkron once calculated that if one reads two books a week over the course of an adult life (from roughly age 20-70), the final tally will be about 5,000. I’d never suffered from FOMO until I read that. No actuarial life table ever hit me so hard. After my yearly physical this week, there was a brief 48-hour window where my doctor was investigating the possibility of me having an aortic aneurysm, but even the wait for the ultrasound results didn’t bring with it the cold touch of the grave like that unforgiving numeral sitting there, marking the end of all potential. Today I counted the total number of books on my shelves (1500 exactly) and it was like watching sand falling in a hourglass. “Oh, my greed is a flame! Oh, that I might be reborn in a hundred beings!”
Alas, Destiny!
In her wonderfully gripping new biography of Nietzsche – the type you stay in bed all Sunday just to finish – Sue Prideaux casts doubt on this story. Indeed, the horse only makes an appearance in the legend 11 years later – in 1900, the year of Nietzsche’s death – when a journalist interviewed Fino, the landlord, about the events of the day. And only in the 1930s – more than 40 years later – do we hear about the horse being beaten and Nietzsche breaking down in tears; this time in an interview with Fino’s son, Ernesto, who would have been about 14 at the time.
…Prideaux casts even more doubt on the cause usually attributed to this insanity: syphilis. Popularised by Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, which has a Nietzsche-like character contract syphilis in a brothel, the evidence simply doesn’t stack up. Although diagnosed as such when admitted to the asylum in Basle, Nietzsche showed none of symptoms now associated with it: no tremor, faceless expression or slurred speech. If he was at an advanced stage of dementia caused by syphilis, Nietzsche should have died within the next two years; five max. He lived for another 11. The two infections he told the doctors about were for gonorrhoea, contracted when he was a medical orderly during the Franco-Prussian War.
Instead Prideaux puts forward the – correct – view that Nietzsche probably died of a brain tumour, the same “softening of the brain” that had taken away his father, a rural pastor, when Nietzsche was a boy. Indeed both sides of the family showed signs of neurological problems, or of suffering of “nerves”, as one put it at the time.
You know, it’s getting to the point where I murmur a little traveller’s prayer before getting on the web each day: please let me get where I’m going without encountering any more stray books I feel compelled to pick up and bring home. I have a fair amount of Nietzscheana on my shelves, especially for a non-scholarly amateur, but I don’t recall ever reading a debunking of these legends surrounding his mental collapse before. Could it be that there is still more to learn here? A biography so gripping you want to stay in bed all day to finish it? Sigh. Well, as Zarathustra said sorrowfully, I recognize my lot. Thus my destiny wants it. Well, I am ready.
All Them Books I Didn’t Read, They Just Sat There on My Shelf Looking Much Smarter Than Me (XVII)
As the kids like to say these days on their social medias and whatnot, “it me”:
I managed to restrain myself this week, though:
I find myself increasingly interested in biographies, and I haven’t read one of Orwell yet. A positive blurb on the jacket from John Gray convinced me that this one was worth three dollars and a couple evenings of my time. I’ve seen a few reviews of Setiya’s book about midlife, none of which made it seem compelling, but again, for a few dollars, I’m open to being surprised. And with a birthday coming later in the month, I’m particularly interested in reflections on this stage of life. I had never even heard of this book of Alan Watts’s scholarly output, and I’ve been searching out his writings ever since I first got online! This is why I love patronizing library sales in big cities with universities nearby.
There was a bit of discussion this week, kicked off by Kevin Mims in the NYT, and encompassing Jessica Stillman, Micah Mattix, and Patrick Kurp, with cameos from Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Umberto Eco, on the vexed question of having “too many” books, especially unread books. I like the idea of using a personal library as a research tool which requires unread books for future reference, though I fear my credentials as a scholar wouldn’t pass a cursory background check. “I’m sorry; you bought all of these to furnish material for…some blog posts?” Still, there is a large number of books that I wouldn’t necessarily want to read, but nevertheless find attractive. Some of them are just handsome objects, and I think they’d look sharp on my shelf. Others are attractive because they’re about some weird and wonderful topic that I had never thought of before, and it gladdens me to know that they exist. They’re like compact reminders of Hamlet’s admonishment to Horatio that the world is far more diverse and interesting than we typically realize, little portals to undreamt-of places scattered throughout space and time. In that sense, I could see myself being a devoted, if superficial, collector — “That one? Oh, I don’t know, I’ve never read it. I just think it’s great that someone wrote it, and besides, isn’t it nice to look at? Only cost me three dollars!” Perhaps the magpie, rather than the owl, should be my spirit animal.
All Them Books I Didn’t Read, They Just Sat There on My Shelf Looking Much Smarter Than Me (XVI)
Read the first OED definition of desultory and see how it mutates: “Skipping about, jumping or flitting from one thing to another; irregularly shifting, devious; wavering, unsteady.” A butterfly flits, purposefully. Watch one moving from flower to flower, probing for nectar. Butterflies have evolved a proboscis resembling a coiled, retractable straw. Their flitting is methodical, not superficial.
Flitting among books is what some of us do every day. Sometimes the flitting is pragmatic – consulting a dictionary or other reference work. More often, we have several books going simultaneously, and one book inevitably leads to others.
For a long time, especially when I bought books at retail prices, I prided myself on doggedly finishing every book I started and never owning more than a couple unread books at a time. Parsimony was my guiding principle. I chose carefully which books to buy and ran my eyes over every inch of text between the covers. Once online shopping came around, I was exposed to a lot more suggestive algorithmic whispers from the shadowed alleyways of Amazon, but I stuck to the straight and frugal path, buying used-good as often as possible, usually after letting a book dwell in wish-list purgatory for a while to make sure I really wanted it. Nowadays, money isn’t quite so tight and I haunt library sales dozens of times a year, so I find myself willing to take a chance on a three-dollar-or-less book which might not have interested me in the abstract. Correspondingly, I’ve become a bit more willing to flit away from an uninteresting book rather than plod through like a tortoise, though I still feel slightly guilty about doing so. That Protestant book ethic is difficult to shake off.
Here’s the group of hitchhikers I picked up last weekend. I may have already read the Wodehouse stories, but since I don’t know of any convenient compilations of his plentiful works, I just grab whatever I find. I had the Lasch book on my wish list once, but it never graduated to a purchase. Epicurus, Horace and Erasmus sounds like one of those “ideal dinner party” scenarios. And I’m delighted to see the unjustly-maligned season of winter being honored with a sympathetic biography:
All Them Books I Didn’t Read, They Just Sat There on My Shelf Looking Much Smarter Than Me (XV)
While the two words may have similar meanings, there is one key difference: Bibliomania describes the intention to create a book collection, tsundoku describes the intention to read books and their eventual, accidental collection.
I used to fret over my increasing inability to achieve “bookshelf zero”, but I’m slowly resigning myself to the fact that having forty to fifty books in the “want to read” column is just becoming my new baseline, given my constant exposure to temptation. A friend recently said she prefers having unread books lying around because of the potential they represent. Likewise, I’d rather maintain the feeling of childlike excitement in finding a new book I want to read, even if it keeps me chained to my Sisyphean task.
Oops, I Did It Again
I got enough money to order fourteen books, plus a friend gave me one unexpectedly. Now I get the extended pleasure of looking forward to the mail each day for the next few weeks. I hope your Christmas was as merry as mine.
My Greed Is a Flame
Books will always exist. Jefferson’s category of the educated minority, on whose existence the prospects of civilized mankind depend, is no longer enough. To educated we need to add interested. The very impulse of human attention depends on human interest, a quality often involved with humility, with our capacity of seeing beyond ourselves. This awareness sometimes issues from reading.
Interest may just as well be involved with greed, as Nietzsche noted:
“Oh, my greed! There is no selflessness in my soul but only an all-coveting self that would like to appropriate many individuals as so many additional pairs and eyes and hands – a self that would like to bring back the whole past, too, and that will not lose anything that it could possibly possess. Oh, my greed is a flame! Oh, that I might be reborn in a hundred beings!” – Whoever does not know this sigh from firsthand experience does not know the passion of the search for knowledge.
The Lady of the House and I were traveling on business over the weekend, and during some free time in between engagements, we went foraging for victuals and found ourselves strolling through a gigantic mall which contained a two-story Barnes & Noble. I was doing fine until I got to the philosophy section, where I found a few books which have been on my Amazon wish list for a while, plus a few previously-unknown others which caught my interest.
Nothing else has this kind of pull over me. I know full well that I can have all these books for half the price if I just wait and buy wisely online, and I know equally well that I already have, uh — ::checks Goodreads, blushes, clears throat:: — 38 books waiting to be read, but lord-o-lord, it was a mighty struggle against the temptation to damn frugality and steam full speed ahead to the register with probably $200 worth of titles under my arm, just for the thrill of having them all right there in a bag. It honestly caused me psychic pain to have to walk away empty-handed. This is the only setting in which I have to beware the onset of temporary consumer madness like that. Plug my ears or tie me to the mast, Lady, the sirens are singing to me again!
Obiter Scripta, no. 14
Me, every day. pic.twitter.com/pPPdYooUbR
— Nicholas Kaufmann (@TheKaufmann) October 19, 2017
At the end of August, lacking anything new to read, I started re-reading Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad. A few days later, a routine trip to the library ended with me bringing home several new releases. Then, the fall library sale season began. I finally finished Twain over the weekend, but I notice that somehow I have 27 books in the currently-reading pile. An imminent birthday will surely lead to the accrual of another ten or so. Will I be able to finish them all by Christmas, in time to buy another stack? Would it make a difference? Of course not. As Zarathustra sighed, “I recognize my lot. Thus my destiny wants it. Well, I am ready.” It’s a good life.
The Torments of Tantalus
Yet at no point did Jefferson’s financial plight slow his spendthrift ways. Faithfully, almost obsessively, he kept recording every purchase and expenditure, but it was as if somehow he could never bring himself to add up the columns. At home, in his voluminous farm records, he never in his life added up the profit and loss for any year, and perhaps for the reason that there was almost never any profit.
…Paris booksellers soon found they had an American patron like no other. In the bookshops and stalls along the Seine were volumes in numbers and variety such as Jefferson had never seen, and his pleasure was boundless. To Madison he would describe the surpassing pleasure of “examining all the principal bookstores, turning over every book with my own hand and putting by everything related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable to every science.” There were weeks when he was buying books every day. In his first month in Paris, he could not buy them fast enough, and ran up bills totaling nearly 800 francs. Nor was the book-buying spree to end. The grand total of books he acquired in France was about 2,000, but he also bought books by the boxful for Washington, Franklin and James Madison.
— David McCullough, John Adams
That image of Jefferson trying so hard to balance his books, only to lose heart right at the final tally, struck me as endearingly poignant. Good thing he didn’t have Amazon.com to tempt him. Who knows how many modern Jeffersons have been diverted from what could have been a glorious political destiny into a pitiful existence as lonely book hoarders?
In the household budget, I keep a fraction of a percent of the quarterly gross revenues for my own selfish hedonistic pleasure, which invariably means buying books. Last week, as I began planning which books to buy with the first quarter’s allotment, I was struck by a strange, lethargic sadness. I had whittled my wish list down to about nine or ten books after the holidays, but then I discovered a rich vein of intellectual ore that I wanted to mine, which led to another twenty or so being added during the last couple of months. Suddenly, it all seemed futile. So much still to be read, and more coming all the time! I can barely make a dent in it with this paltry amount of money! What’s the use? Why suffer the torments of Tantalus over books I’ll never have time or money for? Why not just resign myself to checking out romance novels from the library from now on?
Thankfully, the spell of madness didn’t last long. And thanks to a budget review, a little extra money was trimmed from other line items to be allocated toward monthly book purchases. I wish I could reach back in time to put a consoling arm around Jefferson’s shoulder and encourage him to face that bottom line without flinching. The only way out is straight on through, Tommy, old buddy. A little austerity up front makes the pleasure so much sweeter afterward.