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10,000 Books

10,000 Books

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A quick trip before school starts later this week lands us in Asheville, North Carolina, a place I’ve always wanted to visit. And when you visit Asheville, you visit the Biltmore, the Vanderbilt retreat and largest private home in America. 

There are four acres of floor space in the mansion including 250 rooms (43 of them bathrooms), 65 fireplaces, a bowling alley, swimming pool, pipe organ and a banqueting hall with a 70-foot tall barrel-vaulted ceiling. The mansion is crammed with priceless art, portraits by Whistler and Sargent and landscapes by Monet, and during World War II it housed treasures from the National Gallery of Art. The garden and grounds were landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted. 

Opulence is not my style but there is one room in the house I seriously covet — the library with its collection of 10,000 books. I stood a long time in that room, imagining the guests who visited, including writers Henry James and Edith Wharton, the conversation that flowed, led no doubt by Biltmore’s original owner George Vanderbilt, fluent in eight languages. Ah yes, I could spend some serious time in the Biltmore library.

Once More to the Breach

Once More to the Breach

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There is something both unsettling and gratifying about charging into a project that you’ve left idle for a month. Never mind the explanations for your idleness — a research paper due, the holidays to prepare for — the work itself has been left behind, and it lets you in on its annoyance. 

Surely nothing else can account for the way a once-admirable essay shrinks in power and perceptiveness. Nothing else explains the inelegant phrasing, the lack of insight.

And yet … with the power of time and distance, suddenly there is potential again, too. A new overview, perhaps even a revised table of contents. It’s a good way to enter the new year, with rolled-up sleeves. 

Stars in the Darkness

Stars in the Darkness

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“To take a walk at night in a city that has settled into silence and a darkness that has become far too rare is to return to something precious, something lost for so long you’ve forgotten to miss it.”

— Margaret Renkl, Graceland, at Last

Thus does Renkl describe the days after tornadoes ripped through Nashville in March 2020, bringing the city, already Covid-bound, to its knees.

Or did it? It was a lovely, early spring that year, as it was here, gentle and rainy, and neighborliness was flourishing along with the flowers. People lingered outside because there was only darkness to go home to — and they could look up and see the stars.

But then the power company arrived, and life was back to normal. It was something to celebrate, but I picked up on a gentle melancholy in Renkl’s description. There is something to be said for stepping out of the routine, as long as you don’t step too far. Because once the lights came on … the stars went out.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

A Tide of Books

A Tide of Books

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In a way, it’s tidal. Or at least it should be. A rhythm of inflow and outflow. During the semester, books trickle into my office, barely noticeable at first, then building in strength and volume as the assignments mount. At the end of the semester, they’re supposed to flow out.

As it stands now, books  have piled up on the floor and on my desktop. They’re teetering on top of the filing cabinet and bedside table, threatening to tumble every time I open a drawer. 

These are textbooks, volumes I collected for my research paper (due today but submitted a few days ago — whew!) and other volumes I’ve checked out of the Georgetown library because … well, they have just about everything the public library does not.

This year’s secret weapon in book removal: the textbook rental plan. Some of these treasures are due back in days or I’ll pay a penalty. Now, if only all the other books in my house were rentals, too.

Suspect

Suspect

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Most of my walks are in the suburbs these days, which makes sense given the title of this blog, but when I commuted downtown, a fair number of my forays were in the city. This allowed for more constant comparisons between the urban and suburban stroll.

One of the major differences is that in the city we walk to get somewhere, but in the suburbs we walk to walk — because there are few errands we can run on shank’s mare. For that reason, the long-distance suburban walker, the one who dares hoof it along a major road, can be suspect. This is true for people of all races. 

In his book The Lost Art of Walking, Geoff Nicholson tells the story of a well-dressed man stopped by a sheriff’s patrol car on the one-mile walk to his office in Los Angeles County.  It was on “a completely empty stretch of suburban sidewalk, at midday,” the man explained, and he was dressed in a coat and tie when he was ordered to identify himself and explain where he was going. “As a pedestrian,” the man said, “I was suspect.”

According to his definition (minus the coat and tie), I’m suspect, too.  

Burying the Lead

Burying the Lead

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Last night I read Erling Kagge’s Walking: One Step at a Time, and I did so blind, you might say, unaware of the Norwegian explorer’s biography and significance. 

It was the journalist in me that wanted to shout “you buried the lead” when I came across — on page 155 of a 166-page book — the acknowledgment that “I had a bit of luck in that no one else had yet managed to walk alone to the South Pole.” Uh, what?! 

Still, it was an interesting exercise to make it almost to the end of this slim volume before learning why, in essence, this slim volume was written. Which is not to say that Kagge doesn’t have a lot to share even as an “ordinary” walker. But being the first human to reach the North Pole, South Pole and the summit of Mount Everest — the “Three Poles Challenge” — on foot does give him a certain authority. 

However, I do believe that the revelations he experiences are available to those of us who only trudge around the block. “And this is precisely the secret held by all those who go by foot,” he says. “Life is prolonged when you walk. Walking expands time rather than collapses it.” 

(A diagram of the South Geographic Pole, South Magnetic Pole, South Geomagnetic Pole, and the South Pole of Inaccessibility. Courtesy Wikipedia.) 

Smart Books?

Smart Books?

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I was about halfway through Paul Auster’s Notes from the Interior when I realized … I’d read it before. Or at least parts of it. 

Maybe libraries should issue subtle notifications when patrons check out books multiple times. Something like, “Last borrowed November 2016.” Nothing as overt as, “Are you completely unaware of the fact that you’ve already checked this book out, plus renewed it, so there’s a good chance you’ve read it before?!”

I suppose this falls into the category of the”smart” features I often decry. How many times have I joked that I don’t want my TV or refrigerator to be smarter than I am? So why should my library be?

Which means … I’m back to relying on good, old-fashioned, oh-so-fallible human memory.

Many Nations

Many Nations

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Like many Americans these days I spend a fair amount of time wondering how we’ve become so polarized. It’s not just because we’re in an election season. It’s hard to read a newspaper, watch television or even carry on a conversation without noticing the rifts, which seem to grow deeper by the day.

Now that I’m reading American Nations by Colin Woodard, I have a better idea why this is happening. Although written before the most recent shenanigans (it was published in 2011), the book provides a history of, to use Woodard’s subtitle, “the eleven rival regional cultures of North America.” 

I’m learning about the Tidewater, where I live now, and Appalachia, where I grew up — although Woodward admits that the Bluegrass region of Kentucky (my original stomping grounds) might be considered a Tidewater enclave within Greater Appalachia.  And I’m gaining a better understanding of how the tolerant, anything-goes attitude I love about New York City harkens back to the founding of New Amsterdam and its mercantile roots.

We’re less of a melting pot than a large, lumpy stew. And Woodard is helping me understand why.

 

Library in the Forest

Library in the Forest

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I see them everywhere these days, around the ‘hood and across this land. Along a street or in the woods. Little Free Libraries, they’re called, and what an excellent idea they are: a way to share books, to offer them gratis, to provide a new home for books that need one. (I can imagine the volumes waving their arms, shouting “take me”!)

Several of my walking routes have little free libraries along the way, but this one seems most ethereal and unlikely, situated as it is along a woods trail that sees fewer walkers than most. For that reason I’ve found at least one gem in its reaches. 

Yesterday, no such luck, but it was fun to look, and to savor the very idea of a library in the forest. 

Dear Friends

Dear Friends

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Whenever I write a post these days I’m never far from a shelf of books. This was not the case when I worked in an office and would scramble to put some words down before my day officially began. Now I post at home, and there are walls of books throughout my house. 

I wonder sometimes what a younger person might say about these rows of books. My own children don’t count; they’ve grown up here. But someone else, someone efficient and technical who’s quite aware (as am I) that most of these books are available in digital or audio format and that in those formats they would take up a lot less space. 

Would they understand why the books themselves, the tattered covers, broken spines, dogeared pages, are so precious to me? Would they get that the books somehow become the ideas, characters and worlds they represent? Would they know how it feels to look to the left, as I’m doing now, and see not hundreds of pounds of paper and acres of felled trees, but a collection of dear friends?