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When You Are Going Where Your Library Cannot Follow You

By Walter Donway

May 26, 2022

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I did not know that it would feel so much like a fatal diagnosis. “I’m sorry, Mr. Donway, we can’t tell exactly how long, but…”

Today, on a sunny day in late May, I went to our basement. Not down the stairs because I had boxes to carry from the car. I walked around the house, down the slope toward the pond, to enter by the ground-level door. Noted the upsurge of grass, the Adirondack chairs that Robin had bought long ago, a sole remaining rose bush clinging to the fieldstone foundation wall.

“We are moving in four months, and we have 27 years of stuff.”

“You can’t sit with your laptop, in your green chair, all day, Walter! We are moving in four months, and we have 27 years of stuff. We don’t know where we are going! We may have to store everything. Go down there and deal with your books.” Robin likes to say, invidiously, “I tend to business,” and she is so right.

My buddies at the liquor store provided 10 cartons, making it appear as though I was packing a wine cellar, not my library.

I would guess I brought to this house in East Hampton, with its 400-foot-long pond, an island with the swimming pool, and full-sized mill waterwheel, some 2,500 books. From high school and even earlier, from Brown University, from the old Nathaniel Branden Institute Book Service, from the old Strand Bookstore in the West Village where I stopped after every New School writing class to buy more books. All the favorites mentioned by Ayn Rand, all my discoveries and acquired passions, all my acquisitions as editor of “Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science,” all my brother Roger’s constant recommendations, all my lifelong discoveries of poetry.

Just go down and get rid of them. We are moving. We don’t know where. We are both over 75, what are we saving? Even into the basement, with its door open to the pond, a brilliant tongue of spring sunlight found its way.

My job was made easier by a disaster. Way back, perhaps two years after we purchased the house, we had a freeze up and flood. Much of my library was in the basement. I arrived on a frigid winter day find a foot-and-a-half of icy water in the basement. Coming from above, the water had poured down on the books. They had become so waterlogged that the bookshelves tipped forward and gradually dumped their load into the water.

I stood there beside my son, Ethan, then in college, and stared. He said: “Do you need a hug, Dad?” Don’t get used to it; it doesn’t happen often. But, at that moment, he knew.

We hauled opened the basement door and two-thirds of the water rushed out. Then we bailed, scooped, and mopped. For a few hours, we worked on books with a hair dryer. Like pissing to put out a forest fire.

I received more than $2,000. Not bad for losing 40 years of accumulated treasures.

Ethan and I did copy titles and edition numbers of hundreds of books, however, which I then looked up on Amazon for a price. The insurance agent had said: “Books? You might get 10 cents each.” With my enumeration of replacement costs of losses, I received more than $2,000. Not bad for losing 40 years of accumulated treasures.

But today, it helped.  I had not faced up to the condition of the books. Stiff, browned, wrinkled pages, warped covers. That made decisions easier.

My life has been about many things, I suppose. But, above all, it has been about books. Making hundreds of decisions today, I had to be selective. I had three categories:

  1. Give. (To the East Hampton Library for an area where the library and everyone in town makes available thousands of free books). Unfortunately, the books are supposed to be clean, new looking.
  2. Keep. To move with me, same as you move with your heart and brain and guts.
  3. Dump. (“Recycle,” here.)

Above all, do not forget Kindle. ANYTHING you need. Kindle has it. Why are you hauling these warped, soiled, cracked-spine things with you? Because, aren’t you preparing to die? You won’t need them.

My copies of Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and Walden, from high school. Cheaper by the Dozen from I know not what childhood year. All the Tarzan books, which my Dad brought back from his New York City trips and read to me, making me a Romanticist, valuer, and hero worshipper ripe to embrace Atlas Shrugged.

Ayn Rand’s works, all a “keep.” And Socialism, Capitalism the Creator, Economics in One Lesson… Bastiat, Spencer…

And Hugo? No, available on Kindle. I had them all, now stiff and browned. Dump.

Warped and cracking but keep: Reason and Analysis, The Nature of Thought. Are you ever going to READ them, again?

Malodorous. Will not read, again, but cannot dump. Someone will do it when I’m gone?

All original copies of the Objectivist Newsletter, NBI pamphlets, first copies of the Ayn Rand Letter. Malodorous. Will not read, again, but cannot dump. Someone will do it when I’m gone.

Am I culling my books or preparing for death? Both, of course.

The Light in the West. The first volume of the poetry of Judson Jerome. It was when I was in high school, Jerome showed me the glory of the Great Tradition of metered verse in English. One sensational article for the Writer’s Digest in the late 1950s and 1960s won him a regular column there. He was a professor at Antioch University and editor of The Antioch Review. An inspiring genius at what then was called “textual analysis,” which done honestly banged the drums for the Great Tradition and against free verse. I believe that Jud (as everyone called him) saved a remnant of my generation from enslavement to free verse. Umm…keep.

Opening it… The first poem to me is unforgettable:

“Plunge here in my bare chest

or anywhere. …you puncture skin,

find gristle, ribs, your blade will never nick

my heart (which like an old frog knows the best

endurance… Once

a nimbler, dumb heart hopped in young response.

a touch could scratch it. Never saber more

shall find it out…. (“Cold Blood,” Judson Jerome)

That would be nice, today.

Am I culling my books or preparing for death? Both, of course.

Aristotle by John Herman Randall, Jr., reviewed by Ayn Rand, sold by NBI. It is difficult to say if the book or the review is more compelling. The volume, stiff with dampness, the blinking art deco owl on the cover half-blotted… I know the insights are priceless, but the book long-ago achieved its goal. I grasped the biocentric, proto-modern Aristotle. Recycle. But who comes after me to understand all this? Someone reading this in Kindle.

My old mass-market paperbacks of the Mickey Spillane novels. Agatha Christie. Available on Kindle. Bought them back in Boston at about 24, aflame with the sense of life that Ayn Rand discerned in them. My best buddy from those days once told me: “My girlfriend and I were naked in the apartment one summer day, so hot that there were beads of sweat on her boobs. We were reading Kiss Me, Deadly. I would finish a page, tear it out, and hand it to her. She kept saying, “Hurry up.” Recycle.

Four small cartons kept and with another 500 or so books upstairs, not water-damaged, the “keeps” would keep growing. Four cartons packed to haul to the library, where they may take one sniff and throw most away. This is musty…and who the hell is Frederic Bastiat? There is water damage on this one and who wants something called The Anti-Capitalist Mentality? What is this Economics in One Lesson?

Well, my courage failed. They belonged in the recycling pile, but I eased the pain by imagining someone would find them at the Library, free, and never be the same. Much did indeed drop to the recycling pile. Too water damaged. Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Ken Follett, Hugo, Spillane… poetry anthologies. Histories.

Sweating a bit, I hauled four “give” cartons uphill around the house to the driveway to go to the Library. And one big plastic basket headed for the dump. I found it comforting, or at least a welcome distraction, to think that my basement disaster repeatedly had been the disaster of mankind when irreplaceable book collections like the Library of Alexandria, the Nalanda Monastery in India, the Mayan codices, the Nazi book burnings including the collection of the Institute of Sexual Research, the Iraq National Library… Most of this was deliberate. But sheer attrition throughout history probably accounted for more books. And now, it appears, that may be at an end as print transmigrates into cyberspace. I have several hundred books on my Kindle that would fill four cartons if physical.

Library building and the use of libraries both are declining rapidly. In a recent Pew Foundation survey, 44 percent of people reported using a library over the past year. That was down 10 percent from three years earlier. More recently, the decline in use has been reported to be three percent a year.

A little reassurance, here. Was I dumping my mind? Because just the intensity of my response as I picked up each volume was evidence that I have made them my own. Not word for word. But the ideas, understanding, inspiration, and personal meaning stuck.

I had thought, once, that my library would go to someone. Perhaps Ethan. He does not want it or have room for it. Brother Roger has far more books than I and is wondering what to do with them.

Yet, water-logged, crinkled, and smelly my books are part of my personality today. I would have liked to mention, here, every book that over more than half-a-century made my mind.

The Art of Reasoning by David Kelley bloated, but his The Evidence of the Senses spared.

May There By A Road, my favorite Louis L’Amour novel out of some 80 I read, I quoted in closing my keynote address at the 25th Anniversary banquet of The Atlas Society. “Yo bolson! ‘May there be a road!’ It is said to have been best wishes to a traveler setting off across the Steppe.

Or Kay Jamison’s brilliant and profound, An Unquiet Mind, since I knew Kay when I was editing “Cerebrum.” And Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens, the most profound book I ever read about the origin of consciousness.

What to do with the water-logged, stiff pages of my NBI copy of The God of the Machine—its mouse-grey cover hanging by a thread. Unthinkable to dump. Keep.

A book on judo I bought as a sophomore in high school, when I started training at the Worcester YMCA. Keep. Nostalgia.

I picked up a paperback of Walden, by Henry David Thoreau, Had it since high school. Growing up in a small New England town in the 1950s, I had glimpsed the lingering fires of sectarian Protestant passion that once burned across the landscape. Even unto Transcendentalism. One summer night, I drove with my brother, Roger, to Walden Pond in Concord, walked around it at dusk, stopped to see where once Henry’s cabin and his rows of beans had been. And slept in the car until the local police woke us and kicked us out.

Keep it. But why? Walden, surely, is not going away, in e-book or any other form. No, but this book is an artefact: through this portal I entered Thoreau’s world: the pond, woods, “noise ghost” of the train passing in the night that held the meaning of life, God immanent, what everything—even this fat paperback that I suspended, momentarily, over “dump” or “keep”—reveals to us of our destiny.

One after another, in my hand for the last time ever, their pages riffled, checked for mildew, the books were tossed on the recycle pile or, a little guiltily, put with the “keeps.” Two fat hardcover copies of Roget’s Thesaurus, their light-green covers fractured. Once, I used them daily. But they had moldered here, for years. Old friends…but, no, they cannot come. Where I am going, no, nostalgia cannot follow.

Not now, not this time, but one day I shall shed this body—slogging heart and spongy brain. And “like a woman who has wed, take off the whole clothes, at last, and go to bed.” (Passing by the Graveyard, Andrew Young.) There will be no “keep” pile.

 

 

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