Let's write about how old books influence who we are: About Old Books

Echo essay published in The New York Times by Roger Rosenblatt

To those of you resolving to clean house in the new year, a word of caution: Throw out whatever you want to throw out — the adorable snapshot of you as a 6-year-old with Roy Rogers’s horse Trigger, that jade bust of President Franklin Pierce (who❓), you picked up for a song at a Vermont auction — but, please, not your old books. 

Oh no❗ 😵😰Never your old books. It may be tempting to toss them, I know, because they take up so much space and gather so much dust. Yet every book you have is a story of who you are and who you were when you acquired it. And who you became when you read it. It’s part of you, your present and your history. We may think we finish with books, but they don’t finish with us.

Books are houses. Once inside, you’re transformed, and you become the house you entered. I open the doors of “Jane Eyre,” and I’m ushered into the manse of the cold and brooding Rochester. Eventually he thaws, and I grow to like him, feeling comfortable in the house. But what’s that manic laughter coming from the attic?

Just like the various places you have lived in, a good book can never be removed from your memory. In my books I have lived in King Arthur’s castle and in Ralph Ellison’s basement, each beautiful, startling and revelatory of a universe of thought.

Yet the memories can be jarring. I know what I think of my books. What do they think of me? An ignoramus? An innocent? A tabula rasa on whom all these various influences may leave their marks❓📗 📘

To those of you resolving to clean house in the new year, a word of caution: Throw out whatever you want to throw out — the adorable snapshot of you as a 6-year-old with Roy Rogers’s horse Trigger, that jade bust of Franklin Pierce you picked up for a song at a Vermont auction — but not your old books. Never your old books. It may be tempting to toss them, I know, because they take up so much space and gather so much dust. Yet every book you have is a story of who you are and who you were when you acquired it. And who you became when you read it. It’s part of you, your present and your history. We may think we finish with books, but they don’t finish with us.

Books are lie houses. Once inside, you’re transformed, and you become the house you entered. I open the doors of “Jane Eyre,” and I’m ushered into the manse of the cold and brooding Rochester. Eventually he thaws, and I grow to like him, feeling comfortable in the house. 

But. wait❗What’s that manic laughter 😜coming from the attic❓👻

Just like the various places you have lived in, a good book can never be removed from your memory. In my books I have lived in King Arthur’s castle and in Ralph Ellison’s basement, each beautiful, startling and revelatory of a universe of thought.

Yet the memories can be jarring. I know what I think of my books. What do they think of me? An ignoramus? An innocent? A tabula rasa on whom all these various influences may leave their marks? Someone with the wrong ideas, no ideas?

Someone with the wrong ideas, or no ideas❓😕

Yes, there were times when I’ve heard my books talk to me with mocking condescension. “Are you shocked by me❓” says Vladimir Nabokov with “Lolita.” 

Disgusted❓ Made uncomfortable in the cellar of a darker (not to say creepier) mind❓ “Are you frightened by me❓” says Mary Shelley with “Frankenstein.” 

Confused❓ Astonished❓ Made sad 😞and sympathetic❓ And who is the monster in the story, anyway❓ The creation or the creator❓ And if all that weren’t enough to wonder at, how did this tale come to be written by a 19-year-old girl❓

We read books, and books read us, especially if we approach them with easy assumptions. Before I gave it serious thought, I took “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” for a story about a dope addict with mood swings. 

What Robert Louis Stevenson teaches is that under the influence, a person may be completely and irredeemably changed. The book says, in effect: Here in your facile judgment, learn something about our species. Whatever you think impossible in life is possible. Life is stranger and more dangerous than anything you may ever imagine.

And yet more forgiving, too. Here on my shelves is the autobiography of the early 20th-century Scottish poet, novelist and translator Edwin Muir. He resists psychotherapy at first but then sees a therapist and understands its value, writing, “I saw that my lot was the human lot, that when I faced my own unvarnished likeness I was one among all men and women, all of whom had the same desires and thoughts, the same failures and frustrations, the same unacknowledged hatred of themselves and others, the same hidden shames and griefs.” If one is searching for absolution, look no further.

That was a passage I dog-eared years ago, one among hundreds of dog-eared pages in my books. I wonder what sort of book would be produced by linking all the dog-eared pages. Incoherent or inspired❓ Or the infinite columns of marginalia, standing like beefeater guards beside the original texts. What secret books have I written that hide in all the jottings in the margins❓

Bright new books gleam like actors in tryouts, destined to grow gray with faded titles and bends and bruises on the covers.

“Bleak House” went with me to Crane Beach in Ipswich, Mass., when I was studying for a university exam. You can still feel grains of sand in the spine. A beaten-up book, “Childcraft,” came from my parents’ house — a children’s book my mother read to me. I drew pictures next to the poems. A squirrel, a fish, my father’s derby hat.

To say nothing of the nothing of missing books, the spaces created by those reluctantly lent to visitors who never returned them. Does one ever learn not to lend books? It’s grumpy bad manners to deny the borrowers, to be sure. But look at the holes that once held your valuables. Kidnap victims. If only there had been a ransom. Anatole France wrote that the only books he had in his library were those that others had lent him.

Every time one recommends a book to someone else, that book becomes an ambassador, informing and changing minds one will never know about. And who knows how these minds will use their newly gained knowledge❓

Henry David Thoreau, Oscar Wilde, Ezra Pound — all three wrote or were inspired to write in prison❗

Indeed, the thoughts that informed their works were their way of breaking out. Writing a book from prison, Adolf Hitler nearly destroyed the world. With another book, Nelson Mandela nearly rescued it.

My books are teachers but also companions who know more than I do and who in the long run wish me well. I would no sooner get rid of them than I would an old friend.

More like neighbors, standing in their front doors on my shelves, forever extending their welcomes. 

At night, when my house is dark and I am asleep, do they whisper to one another❓ Do they gossip about me? Does Hamlet have the last word, as usual❓

Books of poems. Of maps. Of adventure. Of cartoons. Books of photographs. Books on philosophy, psychology, philately, history, mystery, art. Short stories. Tall stories. Ghost stories. Right now I am trying to retrieve a passage of poetry that expresses the power of all my books, making the case for holding on to them more forcefully than I ever could.

Ah. Here it is, “The Far Field,” by Theodore Roethke: “A ripple widening from a single stone / Winding around the waters of the world.”

Roger Rosenblatt is the author of “Making Toast,” “Kayak Morning,” “Cold Moon” and the satirical novel “Lapham Rising.”

Let's write about the upside of inevitable aging: For 80 year olds and counting optimists

New York Times essay on aging by Roger Rosenblatt

A famous Maurice Chevalier (b. 1888-d. 1972)

 quote on aging is, "Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative". Another related quote is, "I prefer old age to the alternative"

I’d Like to Stay 85 Forever😀

Now that I’m deep in my 80s, I’d like to stay here forever, and I’ll certainly try. I enjoy being here. The decade is the October of aging. And October is a lovely month, don’t you think❓

To be sure, there are setbacks, such as the other day, when all at once I found myself on the floor. As I rose to leave the living room chair, it slid out from under me, leaving me astonished, my head banging against the piano keyboard nearby. So weak is my twice operated-upon back, so immobile my muscle-less legs, all I could do was sit there looking plaintively at my wife, Ginny, hoping for leverage, and recalling an ad on TV some years ago. A woman about my age now is on the floor, calling out, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” — her cry as noble as Beowulf’s or any tragic hero.

For my part, I felt more foolish than tragic. The fall was a reminder of the liabilities of the 80s. Yet these are more than counterbalanced by the gifts this decade brings. I have a great deal of free time these days, which I’ve chosen to fill in several satisfying if idiosyncratic ways.

I recite lots of poetry, sometimes to Ginny, often to the window. Poetry that has hibernated in my head since my 20s when I used to teach English and American literature at a university. I memorized great swaths of poetry then because it allowed me to talk directly to the students, eye to eye, as if the poetry existed not in a book, but in the air. Right now, if you turned me upside down and shook me (it really isn’t necessary), I could give you several Shakespeare sonnets, a Dylan Thomas villanelle, “The Mind is an Enchanting Thing” by Marianne Moore, the last lines of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and all of the introductory stanza to Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” That may sound like bragging about my memory, but I share it because I think it says something about the lasting power of poetry. Also to brag.

These days, I play more of the piano on which I knocked my head. Playing by ear, too lazy to learn to read music as a kid, my range used to be very limited, especially the chords. With time on my hands I’m getting a little better. You would never mistake me for Bill Evans, or Nat King Cole before his singing days, but my touch is pretty good, and I can do a fair job with “My Romance,” “My Funny Valentine,” “What’ll I Do” and nearly everything by the Gershwin brothers, Fats Waller and Cole Porter. At my age it’s a triumph to get better at anything.

Things I can’t do any more: Run. Play basketball or tennis. I also can’t worry myself to death, or I choose not to. Before my October years, there seemed to be nothing, however inconsequential, that I could not stew over until it grew as big and menacing as Godzilla at night. Nothing was too trivial for my troubled mind. No small rejection. Not the slightest slight. I once came up with a rule, “Nobody’s thinking about you — they are thinking about themselves, just like you.” I wrote it but I didn’t believe it. Now I hardly care if anyone is thinking about me, or not. Hardly.

My love of nature has grown much deeper in this decade. I had always felt an affinity with the natural world, but it was general, casual and fleeting. These days you can catch me at the window, gazing in wonder at the East River (estuary technically), and mesmerized by the shapes in the blue-gray water, the welts and eddies, the tides, the invading armies of the waves, the clouds reflected, looking like submerged sheep.

It’s not what you do in this decade that’s so unusual, or what you think, but rather how you think. The air changes in October. I find myself thinking far less selfishly, giving much more of myself to my friends and family.

In the poem “October,” the sublime Louise Glück found that these years presented one’s life with a cold clarity, as “an allegory of waste.” Me? I see only harvest. I seem to have been partly responsible for creating a crop of six extraordinary grandchildren (add your own excessive compliments here). Before my October years, I would write the same breezy daily note to each of them: “Love you.” Now I have the time and freedom to putter around in their lives, asking this or that, making private jokes. The kids seem to take my attention gladly, or are too polite to tell me they don’t. Either way I have a flourishing garden of young people with whom I can banter to my heart’s content. So I do.

The general improvement is this: In my younger years I was always looking ahead for whatever would befall me. Now I look at what I have. And as those in their 80s appreciate, what one has is considerable. I don’t fear winter, and I don’t regret spring.

The other night Ginny and I watched the film “They Might Be Giants,” with George C. Scott, who thinks he is Sherlock Holmes, and his psychiatrist, played by Joanne Woodward, who actually is a Dr. Watson. I finally realized what it’s about. The film’s title refers to Don Quixote, for whom the windmills at which he tilted might have been giants, though they were not. But the fact that Don Quixote thought they might be giants meant that his capacity for dreams was greater than his fears.

I still have those. Dreams. Dreams for my country and for the world. And love. I have love intact. Ginny, for instance, the remarkable old woman who helped me to my feet when I parted ways with the chair.

My view of Ginny is one thing that October has not changed. I see her as a rescuer now, as I saw her when we married 62 years ago. Bright colors, cool winds, perfect weather.

Roger Rosenblatt is the author of “Making Toast,” “Kayak Morning,” “Cold Moon” and the satirical novel “Lapham Rising.”