A shadow in the library | Catalonia

Not even the battle against the giant octopus. What subjugated me of Twenty thousand leagues of underwater travel it was that in that machine condemned to endless movement in the abyssal depths, cutlery and plates would bear the initial of the host, standing in the oak and ebony dining room. And, of course, the 12,000 volumes of the library, which leaves the forced guest, Professor Aronnax, astonished. “They are the only ties that bind me to the land,” confesses Captain Nemo. It happens the same to me. And I also share with the marine misanthrope that all work on political economy is banned from my shelves, weary of the times and specimens that have been our luck on this trip.

I have three different editions of Verne’s novel. One is pure nostalgia: it is from 1970, with a suspicious coincidence between the adapter (S. Soriano) and the illustrator (Soriano!), In the Roma youth library of the Editorial… Roma !, in another no less disturbing concomitance. I should have suspected, but I was seven years old and my first Verne. The latest edition, with Riou’s classic illustrations, allowed me to undo the mess that I dragged on for years: I thought I had read the work, until when I saw that one I realized that between one and the other there were 480 pages apart. No, I have not gotten rid of the first one: it is a moment in my life and it has specific coordinates of space and time and spirit. And so with all the books, which explains why some of them have already moved with me six times.

That same reason is what makes me have four or five of an author who today surprises me that he seduced me. Their time passed for me, but out of respect for the date that I put at the end of when I have read them, after seconds of hesitation they return to the shelf, after blowing the dust and stirring their pages. After that, press clippings about the author and work often appear, furtive drawings of my children or even a pen that is put on the Easter monkey. Perhaps I do not remember aspects of the plot, but I can determine exactly from a sick entomologist if it was given or acquired and when, where and in what mood I read it.

The conservation of the specimens and their settlement in any corner of the house can be intellectualized

The conservation of the specimens and their settlement in any corner of the house can even be intellectualized. For example: why do I want two editions of the Tristram Shandyby Laurence Sterne? Well, because with the version of Joaquim Mallafré or Javier Marías it is impossible for me to discern the best one and discard the other. It is unsolvable. Ergo, they both stay … And so, as far as they want from original editions, with or without prologues or notes, illustrated or not …

In principle, the library shouldn’t expand infinitely like the universe, but it does. And this, despite the fact that there are a hundred copies still wrapped in their cellophane, that is, not yet to be read but to be released. The theory put forward when they no longer let me enter the house with more is twofold. One is that I am struggling in the arcana of Tsundoku (Japanese art of buying a lot of books and not reading them). It does not usually strain. The other, that it is as or more important to possess the book that is going to be consumed immediately as one that will take time to be. I have verified that it will have its moment. In other words, we are for impulsive and compulsive buying, especially when often a specimen may not cross over again in one’s life. And so we will have lost the possibility of understanding ourselves a little more.

All this is relevant because, in two weeks, chance has confronted me with the need to organize and jibarize both the professional and personal libraries. In the first case, to facilitate the cleaning of the office for colleagues, dear Chernobyl liquidators who have decided to return, longing, to the newsroom. To sum up, the health reason has been imposed on the argument that it was difficult for me to get rid of anything because I did not know when it could be useful to me.

At home it was different: it was about forcing the eldest son to merge his already remarkable library with that of his father. The operation had to be fast and allow a purge of repeated titles. Nothing. To fail in the first one, it contributed that there is no copy that does not contain marks. Far from sacrilege, it is a tribute: books teach us to live, they are manuals for the use of existence and they tell us what we are, what we suffer from. They cast our shadow. The poet José Emilio Pacheco said it best: “We don’t read others; we read in them ”. And because we don’t want to forget it, we underline it. The codes of my reading tracks have mutated: I started with a respectful, almost invisible, underline; later, like Borges, notes in lower case on the end caps. Over the years, the audacity to applaud (via asterisks) or a minimum dialogue with the author, in the margins of the pages.

Everything highlighted, which one soon does not remember, seems justified and vital. “The heroic is not an act, it is constancy; it is not a luminous point, but an indestructible fine line in its modesty ”, I highlighted from the loser by Sánchez Piñol. “I need to deal with good people,” I pointed out from poor Prince Myshkin of The idiot, by Dostoevsky… I looked randomly. “In short, life has an element of diabolical coincidence that people too prosaic will never perceive,” Chesterton makes Father Brown reflect. Pure chance find it now. Or not: perhaps it is the proof of the coherence of any library, of the secret dialogue that one’s books maintain with each other.

A random inventory confirms 11 books by Graham Greene, 12 by Kafka, 18 by Marsé, 22 by Pla and 41 (monographic shelf, double bottom) between residents Vargas Llosa and Vázquez Montalbán. I don’t know what all this says about you. In any case, contemplating it reminds me of who I wanted to be, who I am and where I have been, and when I have time (two-thirds are yet to be read), it will tell me where I want to go and where I have been wrong so far.

I did not purge. Nor did I end up joining the two libraries: if I had run it, it would have blurred the older man’s personality. I owe you another apology.

–