A passion for books

My wife and I grew up in a world of books which we have tried to share with our children. I asked my son Roel how reading books has influenced him. He  sent me an answer that I want to share with all you, readers.

Some call it biblophilia, or even a “gentle madness,” the love for books. I’ve always felt my connection with the written word is more intimate. I recall a conversation with one of my writing students, Mica, a stoic senior whose perennial inclusion in her school’s pep squad is my go-to example of irony. Emphatically saying she refuses to read Ebooks, preferring the sensory interaction with a physical book, I proceeded to show her photos of my old bedroom in my parents’ home to defend my occasional purchase of soft copies. Lacking space, and any semblance of furniture except a mattress and a stereo component, there was nothing else but shelves overflowing with books, with a very narrow path on the floor in between monstrous stacks. Her reaction: “You’re insane.” Perhaps it is madness, after all.

Crediting my parents for having their own bookshelves lined with everything from literary gems to science fiction, from philosophy to history and nearly every other genre, my childhood was full of countless nights raiding a bottomless reading well. First editions of Kurt Vonnegut, tattered Quijano de Manila reportages, bootlegged Salman Rushdie at the height of fatwa, complete sets of Asimov and Tolkien, to name a few.

One of my first, but most lasting, late night discoveries at 21 in early 1996 was the saintly Albert Camus via a primordial edition of The Outsider, heavily underlined by my mother’s steadfast English Literature hand. Described regularly as a Nobel Prize winning French existentialist, Camus, in my eyes, has remained a firm life companion and mentor.

Discovering The Myth of Sisyphus I spent the next few days holed up, comprehending how even the most rigid negation of all things must yield to beauty, meaning and responsibility. To this day, a mantra on tough days is “If Sisyphus manages to be happy with his beloved boulder, I should quit my whining and embrace life.” Since then I’ve managed to own everything he has published, even diaries and collected letters. If someday they’d discover a cookbook of French cuisine written clandestinely, I’d get my hands on it to drown in the ever-reliable grace and firmity of light, with purpose and transcendence.

Reeling from a devastating ending to a relationship a year later, I spent days with a different kind of weariness hopping from one bookstore to the next down south where I grew up. Turning stubbornly to literature after coming home on a brutal weekday in fifth grade to find my comic book collection sold to our friendly neighborhood newspaper delivery guy along with old bottles, any armchair shrink would safely assume my scorn for protagonists in Spandex saving the world with word balloons was symptomatic. Walking aimlessly through the various sections, in an age when one solely devoted to graphic novels was still considered ludicrous, the intoxicating spines of the complete first edition Sandman trade paperbacks by Neil Gaiman caught my eye. My chessily flatlining heart mercilessly had me willing to try anything. Little did I know that I would re-enter a glorious world not only of translucent dreams, but of endless possibilities. Continuing to this day to discover other master storytellers of the medium such as Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Mervin Malonzo, Arnold Arre, Adrian Tomine, Tom King and many others – sometimes cape-crusading and often starkly realistic – I’ve never forgotten the lesson of taking risks and remembering to breathe while falling.

Books have consistently helped define pivotal life events: Douglas Coupland’s Life After God consumed while critically learning meditation and serenity not in a glitzy airconditioned gym class, but every 7 a.m. on a ratty handwoven mat in a stuffy halfway house from an orange-clad Dada; Emiliana Kampilan’s luminous Dead Balagtas arriving in a timely manner just when I was pondering the migration of souls, the empty spaces they leave behind and new ones permanently occupied.

Being ecstatically introduced to Borges’ Collected Fictions during my first term as a creative writing grad student not only obliterated any uncertainty but rehearsed my mind, preparing me for a thousand Black Mirror Christmas specials both onscreen and off. My literary soulmate Holden Caulfield allowed me to see compassionately into the hearts of potential castaways and social dregs such as the Fishers of Six feet Under and Transpotting’s Mark Renton. An indispensible skill as one finds his place in a tremulous society that always expects more from those to whom much has been given.

Then there is that old world poetry anthology rifled through on a desolate summer night by an adrift college student in between courses, providing needed radiance and focus, paving the way for the likes of Whitman, Bidart and Glück and a worn copy of Letters to a Young Poet kept at arm’s length to snatch a life away from the brink over and over again. Presently, I always pack Joy Harjo’s How We Became Human or regenerative poetry collections of Conchitina Cruz or Joel Toledo in my backpack as talismans when the strain of the daily grind becomes unbearable.

Like an emotional thespian trying to deliver a coherent acceptance speech at the Oscars, I have surely left out many authors, characters and titles, comrades-in-arms. But while the need to escape and be entertained is also ably met by books, those dutifully lining my shelves have come to comprise my lifelong madness, reinforced by the reflection, clarity and more purposeful manner of living and loving evoked by each sublime tale or verse.

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