bookworm

I’m quite tired this morning. It’s because I’ve gotten my days and nights mixed up again, a frequent consequence of my vision issues. It typically doesn’t make too much of a difference, except (for obvious reasons) on Sundays, but today seems a bit different somehow.

And so, I’m doing what I always do when I feel out-of-sorts: I’m looking for something to read. I run my fingers over books on the shelves, those markers that make me realize how quickly my life has passed. It’s been full, this life I’ve lived, as evidenced by the volumes that have captivated me. There’s the shelf of Greek books — the plays, philosophers, mythology, science; different translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey; books on Greek and Cycladic art. Ancient history. Plato. Virgil.

Those dark spines give way suddenly to French literature, then American; there’s William Carlos Williams underneath The Presocratic Philosophers. And my ever-present Kerouac lies atop the first volume of Vitruvius — On Architecture.

This is cheering me up already.

Beneath the French are the Russians, with the Germans off to the right. And, funny thing, on the deeper shelf underneath them, tilting a little like rock layers exposed along a road cut, are music scores representing most of Europe and the new world, along with a couple of books on anatomy and a few Braille manuscripts, stuck there because they’re the same height as the scores.

I’ve always been a voracious reader. Even as a child, I’d churn through book after book every week. I loved the power of the written words, and the way they’d take me on a journey through space and time, nearly always to destinations unknown. No matter where I went or what I was doing, there were always a few books and at least one journal that accompanied me.

I could stop right here and probably tell a story about any one of those books. Each has a specific reason for remaining, not least of which is as chosen companions and markers on this strange journey of my particular life, decade after decade. I’ve books that were given to me as gifts when I was in primary school, and others purchased decades later. And even though these books represent an intellectual journey to which I sometimes arrogantly attach great importance, the early ones were actually a pretty good predictor of what would end up on the shelves.

But now I’m standing here, running my fingertips over books whose stories have largely gone silent.

I’m thankful that I’ve learned Braille, but oh, how I miss the anticipation of picking up a beloved book and inspecting the covers before I begin to read. I’ve always loved the weight of the book in my hands, and the texture of the paper between my fingers as I turn the pages. There’s something very calming about the soft thwish of pages gently flipping as they bind the words into a story that’ll live forever.

Ça va sans dire.

Earlier, I listened to a slow movement from Tchaikovsky’s Barcarolle, then a bit from Bach’s Aria mit 30 Verδnderungen, BWV 988, ending with Variations 21-25, which I often play when someone dies. It’s a journey right into the heart of confusion and pain, and then it gradually untangles and comes to rest, even if the path to that place is still not especially comprehensible.

That piece has a lot of mystery in it for me because it takes me somewhere difficult and dark and undenied, carrying my doubts bundled on my back. When I emerge out of the woods, there’s not relief, exactly, but there’s a definite sense of having done something I needed to do. The music has accomplished something certain books do, too, in a totally different way.