The Bodies of Books

The public library building in the city where I grew up stood on a street thickly shaded by old chestnut trees. In the summer the white feathery chestnut flowers with tinges of red at the center covered the sidewalk. I crushed them under my feet as I entered the gate that led to the library's inner courtyard. The children's section was all the way in the back of the building. A flight of stairs led to a cramped lobby full of backpacks, and, in cold weather, of piles of winter coats. You weren't allowed to enter the children's section wearing your coat or hat or schoolbag.

It was always warm in the children's section; in winter I sweated as I walked up and down the rows, squatting to read the titles on the bottom shelves. The bookcases made a little fortress around you wherever you stood. You could hear the murmur of librarians' voices, the scrape of a chair's legs on the hardwood floor, the reckless shriek of a young child who'd found a picture book he liked. But these sounds seemed to come from a great distance, from another world. Sometimes I closed my eyes and just smelled the odor of hundreds of books piled together, that dusty, spicy smell of yellowing paper. Then I slid a volume out from the shelf, opened it at random the way people open the Bible to look for an answer to a difficulty in their lives, and started to read. This is how I discovered Romanian literature -- the good stuff and the not so good stuff written in praise of the Communist regime -- and Jack London and Charles Dickens and Alexandre Dumas.

After I painfully chose only three books, the maximum number I was allowed to check out, I walked up to the librarian sitting at an enormous desk covered with large mugs of pens and pencils and wooden boxes stuffed with frayed index cards. She stared at me over her glasses for half a minute before she stamped my library card. She didn't trust me to take good care of the books. She enumerated the fines for various offenses -- torn or stained pages, defaced front cover, losing the book altogether. She asked me if I understood all the rules. I said I did and hurried out with the books clasped against my chest.

For most of my childhood books filled me with both excitement for the strange miracle of words inside, and fear of the fragility of paper bound together with sweet-smelling, crumbling glue. It seemed reckless to choose such frail materials as ink and wood fiber to preserve the written word. Ancient civilizations knew better; they chiseled words into stone. But you cannot hold tablets of stones in your hands or on your lap; you cannot carry them with you to read while you're waiting for a bus or a train or a plane; you cannot own them just for yourself, for your own pleasure. They're enduring but inaccessible, like gods. Books are like human bodies, mortal, flawed but within your reach, and able to be loved as only flawed, mortal things can.