Books and Inspiration

Despite the ease of its acquisition, obtaining information on the Internet is not always the most satisfying avenue. Quick: yes. Colorful and noisy: absolutely. Entertaining: of course. Accurate: generally. Up to date: enough to cause apoplexy hysteria as the daily news streams into our monitors. No matter how enticing browsing the Internet – and we have used it, asking students to locate and evaluate online literary magazines, quickly locating a photo of chrysanthemums, checking an address – the heart of knowledge for some of us, remains books.

Books are a satisfying weight in our hands, a tactile sensation, the smell of old pages from libraries or the fresh, sharp aroma of new paper and fresh ink. Did a hundred forefingers turn this page, or am I the first? Amazon earned points in my book, when it incorporated the used book sellers. [New copy: $23.99; used copies starting at low price of .02]

When we borrow them from the library, we are honor bound to return the books. When we buy them, we not only have them when they call to us, we have stacks of them to search when we don’t quite know what we want to read. In doing so, we find the books we set aside for another day. It’s like rummaging in the refrigerator, but without the worry of finding moldering pears in the vegetable bin. We are not the only people who need to live with books.

C.S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy: the Shape of my Early Life, described his parents’ house:
“I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cistern and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interest, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books more emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass. Where all these books had been before we came to the New House is a problem that never occurred to me until I began writing this paragraph. I have no idea of the answer.”

That, as I tell my English 1 students, is a perfect example of repetition, as well as question-and-answer.

In The Little Bookroom, Eleanor Farjean describes the origin of her story ideas:
“Of all the rooms in the house, the Little Bookroom was yielded up to books as an untended garden is left to its flowers and weeds. There was no selection or sense of order here. In dining-room, study, and nursery there was choice and arrangement; but the Little Bookroom gathered to itself a motley crew of strays and vagabonds, outcasts from the ordered shelves below, the overflow of parcels bought wholesale by my father in the sales-rooms. Much trash, and more treasure. A lottery, a lucky dip for a child who had never been forbidden to handle anything between covers. That dusty bookroom, whose windows were never opened, through whose panes the summer sun struck a dingy shaft where gold specs danced and shimmered, opened magic casements for me through which I looked out on other worlds and times….
“Crammed with all sorts of reading, the narrow shelves rose halfway up the walls; their tops piled with untidy layers that almost touched the ceiling. The heaps on the floor had to be climbed over, columns of books flanked the window, toppling at a touch. You tugged at a promising binding, and left a new surge of literature underfoot; and you dropped the book that had attracted your for something that came to the surface in the upheaval. Here, in the Little Bookroom, I learned, like Charles Lamb, to read anything that can be called a book. The dust got up my nose and made my eyes smart, as I crouched on the floor or stood propped against a bookcase, physically uncomfortable, and mentally lost. I was only conscious of my awkward posture and the stifling atmosphere when I had ceased to wander in realms where fancy seemed to me more true than facts, and set sail on voyages of discovery to regions in which fact was often far more curious than fancy. If some of my frequent sore throats were due to the dust in the Little Bookroom, I cannot regret them.
“No servant ever came with duster and broom to polish the dim panes through which the sunlight danced, or sweep from the floor the dust of long-ago. The room would not have been the same without its dust: star-dust, gold-dust, fern-dust, the dust that returns to dust under the earth and comes from her lap in the shape of a hyacinth.”

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What strikes me as I ponder those passages is the luxury of time and exploration. No one stands by with a schedule of activities, determined these children will conform to their classmates’ mold. And no one censors their books. Maybe the world has changed; maybe to protect our children we must decide what is suitable for their reading and what is not. Maybe we censor the television and not the bookshelves. If a book or a tv show is a pasting-up of only the bits to shock, then it preys on our emotions. If the bits that shock and startle are part of the characters’ stories, perhaps they are included for the plot and not for the readers’ salacious enjoyment.

But when we censor books, we state that we can form imagination according to our preconceived rules. We control ideas. Societies have done that. Those places were also unkind to thinkers, writers, children and animals, and any part of the environment that did not serve those in power. Perhaps if we wish their spirits as well as their bodies to grow, we need to be very, very careful to open our children and ourselves to the complete world of books.