There
are people who buy books by the yard to decorate
their walls. For some, a grand library of moroccan
leather bindings was the pretense for intellect. I
looked about my study at the many books that
overcrowd the shelves, more books in piles
"growing from the furniture and floor like
stalagmites," as I've mentioned in an earlier
essay. It is to my shame that I have not read the
vast majority of them. They are not there for show.
It is rare that I have visitors to my study. I bought
every book with the intention of one day reading it.
Many of the volumes are fine press books, beautiful
to the eye and hand, made with a craftsmanship that
signifies love or respect for the literature it
enhances. These are books too big to pack into one's
pocket, too precious for anything but a long sit in a
comfortable chair. It isn't that I don't read, but
that the fragments of time available to me have me
reading magazine articles or paperbacks while I eat
or bathe. For all the books I own, it seems the one
in my hand was urgently borrowed from the local
library. I don't want to be one of the hypocrites who
collect books without reading them.
In June I made the decision to not allow myself the
purchase of any new books and to cease to borrow
books from the library - except when necessary. I
became determined to mine the small treasures that
already line my bookshelves. The time had come to
take a bite out of my collection, to feed on my
stores of fat tomes. I needed to take some of that
raw material I'd been gathering in codices and load
them it into my neural library.
On the sixteenth of June 2004, because it was
Bloomsday, indeed the hundredth anniversary of
Bloomsday, I put aside the book I had just started
reading, Seven Pillars of Wisdom by
T. E. Lawrence, and began James Joyce's Ulysses.
After all, this is a book praised by the experts, the
authorities, those who make lists of the hundred most
important books of the Twentieth Century. I have
always suspected that most of the people who have
owned this book have not finished it, and many have
not even started it. The book has resided on my shelf
thirty-five years.
It isn't as if I never opened the book. I have read
the last 'two' sentences on more than one occasion.
That's not nothing; together they are forty-six pages
long - Molly Bloom's soliloquy. But when I had tried
to read the book starting at, "Stately, plump
Buck Mulligan...," I didn't get far before my
eyes glazed over and my mind went off on some distant
adventure.
I have a friend who, I am proud to say, owns a copy
of Ulysses in the Limited Editions
Club version. (I bet you he has never read it.) It is
a book worth several thousand dollars, being one of
1,500 numbered copies that the Limited Editions Club
produced in 1935 with illustrations by Henri Matisse.
Six original soft-ground etchings and twenty color
plates of Matisse's drawings. George Macy, the
founder of the Limited Editions Club, wrote, "I
have never been so greatly impressed with the mental
facility of an artist as I was when I suggested to
Matisse that he should illustrate Ulysses. He said,
over the telephone, that he had never read it. I got
Stuart Gilbert to send him a copy of Mr. Gilbert's
translation into French. The very next morning, M.
Matisse reported that he had read the book, that he
understood its eighteen episodes to be parodies of
similar episodes in The Odyssey,
that he would like to give point to this fact by
making his illustrations actually illustrations of
the original episodes in Homer! I may have been taken
in, of course. If I was not, it can surely be said
that Henri Matisse grasped this book quicker than any
other man ever did."
As is the practice of the Limited Editions Club, the
book was signed by the artist, Matisse, and it was
supposed to also be signed by Joyce. Joyce grew tired
of the task and only signed 250 of the 1,500 books.
My friend does not have a copy signed by Joyce, which
would then be worth over $20,000.
My copy is the ubiquitous Random House edition, which
comes without illustrations. In fact, I believe it
was bought from the Book-of-the-Month Club by my
father at my request. That was when I was still in
high school.
Here at middle-age, plodding along in a career at
AT&T, for which I hold no enthusiasm, there are
too few opportunities for me to sit and read for any
great length of time. Meanwhile, Ulysses
offers few places where the reader can put the book
aside. The few chapters are long, meant for someone
living in a slower paced era, or someone who doesn't
drive themselves every day to work but rides the bus
or train, or someone who lives alone or doesn't love
their wife.
So I began reading the book, but very slowly, and for
the first time I was enjoying it. I enjoyed it for a
great while. Alas, I enjoyed it less with time as it
constantly demanded an effort. I hardly understood
many of the references, but it was enough to be a
voyeur, listening to someone's private thoughts. I
couldn't be expected to understand the private
thoughts I overheard. The references would be
personal, the subconscious would be spitting up
memories that would be unfamiliar to me. A book of
768 pages; by 160 I was bored with the effort of this
voyeurism. This is a book about interiors of the mind
and not of places. It was free-floating voices I was
hearing without context. I could not see Dublin,
neither exteriors nor its rooms. I was awashed in
ghostly voices, but I could not place them in the
world they occupied. The book requires that you know
Dublin first. That I understood any of it, I must be
thankful that I saw the movie.
Oh, the unmitigating shame, I was done, for now, at
page 160 and could not go further. It is not a book
that can be read piecemeal. It required the luxury of
discretionary time. I made peace with myself and
picked up J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the
Chamber of Secrets, which I finished in
short order and thoroughly enjoyed. Today I am once
again reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom. |