Book #8: Unpacking Daddy's Library

"When are you going to put together my reading list?" Daddy asked.

A hush fell over the kitchen. He'd been asking me about this for weeks now, and wasn't it the least I could do? After all, I'd taken his handouts during not one, not two, but three degrees in English Literature.

Recently retired, Daddy had decided to take up reading for reasons that were characteristically quantitative. The house was crammed with novels, memoirs and anthologies that my mom and I had been reading all our lives and their sheer number had convinced my dad that there must be something to this reading thing.

Now that he was no longer building steel plants, it was time to roll up his sleeves and delve into the world of literature.

"Why don't you just go online?" I said. "Google 'reading.' A bunch of lists should come up."

"That's no good." His cheeks hardened. "Those lists are impersonal - based on polls or the whims of some critic who doesn't even know me. I want a list that's just for me."

I rolled my eyes. With everything else on my mind, did I have time for this?

Then I recalled an essay I'd read in grad school, Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library." What drives someone to read and collect books, Benjamin suggests, is anything but rational:

"I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth. This is the childlike element which in a collector mingles with the element of old age. For children can accomplish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways."

Despite Benjamin's mystical language, his point is simple, I think. He's saying that what draws a person to one book over another cannot be explained purely in terms of the book's reputation. Rather, the reader yearns to connect on some deeply personal, childlike level with the world in miniature that the novel brings to life imaginatively. This is a matter of the novelist being able to predict - almost magically - your idiosyncratic fantasies and wishes that go back to your earliest memories and desires.

It's a beautiful coincidence when reader and book unite in this way, the beginning of a lifelong relationship.

So my old man wanted a reading list. But what did I know about his earliest memories and unconscious drives?

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Book #1: Searching for Thoreau on a Cold Winter Night

I’d tried to make the best of moving to the boonies by imagining a great escape to nature was in store.

"To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning the feebler notes of other birds—think of it!"

"I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

Startling epiphanies were just around the corner. Or maybe I’d just been reading too much Walden.

Right. Nature. Through the eyes of a naïve city girl. What had I been thinking?

Now that I had my first semester of teaching under my belt, I knew that was fiction and this was reality.

Reality was having to call in sick and take the bus two-and-a-half hours to Halifax to see my therapist, Harriet, to deal with these emergency days that incapacitated me every so often. Days when I just couldn’t bear to get up in front of the swarm of rosy, all-too-wholesome faces that blankly stared while I lectured on the figure of the madwoman in the Victorian novel and cross-dressing actors on the Shakespearean stage.

Harriet was a pudgy blond woman with sad lines fanning out around her eyes. She looked at me like she really did understand my suffering, but so far I’d been less than dazzled by her insights.

"The students hate me," I said. "They look at me and they don’t see a professor. They expect a professor to look like a grizzled old hag whose life has passed her by."

"Well, thank god you’re not in that camp," Harriet said. "You hardly look older than the students."

Maybe it was true – I was a fake. The eve I defended my dissertation, I had no idea what I was getting into. I didn’t have a clue what was involved in becoming a professor. Who could have foreseen the amount of work involved in writing lectures on the fly to teach a full course load? Although I’d pulled my share of all-nighters as a grad student, those were nothing compared to the string of sleepless nights that left my brain feeling like sawdust behind the lecture podium.

My office clock said 11:55. Once again, I’d fallen asleep at my desk, my face plastered to a sandwich wrapper. The night lights from the football field outside my window streamed in, giving my bookshelf an eerie glow. So much for marking papers.

As I waited for the elevator in the pea green corridor, a bearded man came out of nowhere.

"Howdy," he said, standing too close. My stomach did a back flip.

But he was just the caretaker. Smiling awkwardly and standing a little too close.

I rushed outside and stood on the cement piazza surrounding the Arts Building. Beyond the empty parking lot loomed the low, undulating hills known, for some strange reason, as "the highlands."

I remembered how when I’d landed this job, I’d imagined myself going for long walks in the woods, communing with birds, brushing against ferns, my ears attuned to every rustle and sigh of a blade of grass. Like Thoreau, who'd luxuriated in his sojourn living in a cabin at Walden Pond, my thoughts would become serene: "This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself."

The hills around me weren’t very high, yet they hemmed my soul in. They might as well have been the Andes.

Photo from: here