In my winter years, traveling lighter forced me to bring only a few of my paper and ink friends to Austin. Several boxes [1,000 books], keep each other company in my rented home in Rexburg.
I spent so many years reading books for the first time that I never believed I would live long enough [and forget so much] to actually begin rereading my library, once I retired in 2005.
Francois Mauriac, France’s “Man for All Seasons,” said of rereading: “If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads but what he rereads.” Mauriac, a man of both mind and heart, opposed French involvement in Vietnam. Again, shackled to a follow-up president who didn’t/couldn’t[?] read history, we found ourselves up to our necks in snakes, which made Vietnam an ongoing metaphor for all the other wars we would go out into the world and try and lose.
Johnson and Westmoreland could not finish what Kennedy started [and here I just assumed he read history books after swimming in the White House pool.] Let me return, then, to books that reflect my “ heart.”
Sorry, I digress again. Mauriac also disliked Albert Camus, that always popular but overrated favorite of restless, uprooted Existential undergrads. Who would want to read the likes of Samuel Johnson and John Donne before graduating?
You might expect at least a short list of my constant friends. That would bore you and call unnecessary attention to me, T.S. Eliot’s “old man in a dry season.” My choices? One disgruntled student said he didn't like the “Old, thick books," required for my course.
Remember, there is a second, third, etc. reason for rereading. We simply forget what we've read. However, when I heard of a French journalist who had been kidnapped in Lebanon, with nothing else at hand, read War and Peace 17 times. I am guessing he was rereading for more reasons than simply fearing he would forget. Reading keeps us sane.
Now I enjoy the wandering months. Yes, I have a bibliophile’s Wanderslust. I simply follow the desire where it leads; those moments when I simply “follow my bliss” [Joseph Campbell]. Nobel Peace Prize winner, Swede Tomas Transtromer’s poetry trilogy is in the mail from Amazon. . . .
What we read ends up being what our hearts need. This assumes you’re centered enough to know those often evasive inner needs. Reading cures and assuages our uncertainties; reading assures us, says C.S. Lewis, that we’re not alone.
And like medications, one person’s book just may kill you, while another suffers the same ailment and recuperates nicely reading the same lethal print. In other words, I don’t expect two of my grandchildren who are fluent in reading and speaking Spanish to ever read Gabriel Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude. And yet they will always be my special angels.
The choice is theirs—and yours. At this point there’s plenty of space in my wobbly oblong circle of life and eternal life for this greatest of contemporary writers and Columbia’s reading gift to the whole world. There is, in fact, space enough for all—an eternal landscape which will encompass the rich diversity and style as numerous and rich as there is sand on all the ocean shores.
