For me, a book made of paper will always be a beautiful object that warms a room even as it expands (or entertains, or challenges, or informs, or comforts) a mind, and a bookcase will always represent time itself. I walk past one of our bookcases, and I can tell you exactly why a particular book is still there, never culled as space grew limited, even if there is no chance I’ll ever read it again.
When I reread a book from my own shelves, I meet my own younger self. Sometimes my younger self underlined a passage that I would have reached for my pencil to underline now. Other times she read right past a line that stuns me with its beauty today. I am what I have read far more surely than I am what I have eaten.
By looking at our bookshelves, I can tell you who my husband was, too — the hardly-more-than-a-boy who read “A Brief History of Time” on our honeymoon, the young teacher who learned he was about to be a father by reading the inscription I wrote inside a copy of “The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America,” the doting son who memorized Irish toasts to please his aging father, who still had cousins back in the old country. To walk past our bookcases is to make a different study of the history of time.
When I reread a book from my own shelves, I meet my own younger self. Sometimes my younger self underlined a passage that I would have reached for my pencil to underline now. Other times she read right past a line that stuns me with its beauty today. I am what I have read far more surely than I am what I have eaten.
By looking at our bookshelves, I can tell you who my husband was, too — the hardly-more-than-a-boy who read “A Brief History of Time” on our honeymoon, the young teacher who learned he was about to be a father by reading the inscription I wrote inside a copy of “The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America,” the doting son who memorized Irish toasts to please his aging father, who still had cousins back in the old country. To walk past our bookcases is to make a different study of the history of time.
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