sorts of books in every field.
My high school library was tall, I remember, as if piles of
books held up the ceiling; it was dense with books organized
according to the Dewey decimal system. I liked to look at and
to touch the books. I believed I could feel the heat emanating
from them, and no heat meant no light. My father had told
me I had to read everything, that to read books of only one
view was the equivalent of a moral wrong. When I asked why,
he uttered the incomprehensible words: “Sometimes writers
lie.” In my early years, my parents made up for the latitude
they gave me in reading by seeing to it that I read on a continuum, both political and literary. When I went weak in the knees for Dostoyevsky, my dad gave me some Mark Twain or
my mother one of Eric Bentley’s books on the theater. I just
wanted to read everything; there was never enough. It wasn’t
quite as simple as it sounds. My mother was more tense about
what I read than my father, but then, she was in the thick of
it: my bad attitudes, bad habits, and bad behavior. I did get
ideas from books: that’s what they’re for. I’ve been astonished
by the pro-pornography argument that people are not influenced by what they read or see. Why, then, bother writing or making films? One wants to persuade. One wants to knock
the reader senseless with the shock of the new or the old
reconceived. Rimbaud articulated the writing ambition when
he wanted to derange the senses, though he meant his own.
Sometimes it’s the rawness of the writing that makes everything inside shake and break; sometimes it’s the delicacy of the writing that makes everything inside simply recognize a reality
different from the known one or experience a lyricism heretofore unknown. For me, subtle writing was almost always anti-urban; it took me to the steppes of Russia or Huck Finn*s
South.
The library brought the world to me: I went with Darwin
on the HMS
I plot ed with Marx about how to end poverty. I had read
most of Freud, al of Darwin, and most of Marx before I graduated from high school. This was not with the help of the high school librarians.
Instead, I learned their work schedules, because we were not
allowed to take out more than two books a day and I needed
a bigger fix than that. Al records were kept by hand. So if I
went into the library during a new shift, I could get two more
books, then two more, then two more. The librarians treated
the books like contraband, and so did I. My friends and I had
a commitment to
in the library. We bought a lot of copies over time. We shelved
them. Each time it would be a different one of us who had
the responsibility for get ing the book into the library, on the
shelves. Sometimes we catalogued the book - what was gained
if no one knew it was there? - and other times we shelved it
