A life with books
To illustrate my father’s relationship, or, should I say, obsession with books, I often relate the story of how Winnie Monsod, then on an official trip with President Corazon Aquino along with my father, opened her suitcase in New York to discover, to her fury, that my father had used her formal evening gown to wrap his books. As a child, one of the first things my father taught me how to do was to wrap books in clothing to preserve their shape. Over the years I have, through osmosis or, rather by virtue of being one of my father’s minions, learned about the various methods and materials for wrapping, binding and preserving books, including how to improvise methods for dehumidifying a library in the tropics and where to find Italian marble paper in the sketchiest parts of New York City. Looking back at almost two decades on the road, I realize that one of the few constants in my then vagabond life was the book-related missions my father sent me on, the result being that I experienced cities not just through food and art, but through their networks of bookstores, commercial, independent or antiquarian.
My children, if I have them, will likely not be able to go on similar adventures. From Barnes and Nobles, Borders, Rizzolis, Powell’s, Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, Blackwell’s, Waterstone’s, W H Smith, Foyles, Dymocks to Shakespeare and Co., the Strand and Green Apple Books, if you recognize the names, then you have been to at least three or four of the world’s great cities and, unfortunately, you are also showing your age. A number of the bookstores I just mentioned no longer exist, the business of books, like the business of music succumbing to the trend towards digitization and e-archiving. Instead of walking down narrow sets of stairs, browsing creaking shelves, and meandering discussions with random characters, this generation and the next will tap and swipe on a tablet, losing, it seems to me, the tactile, communal, occasionally serendipitous experience of searching for, happening upon and thumbing through physical books. When I visited my law school recently, the main university bookstore, once stocked two or three levels with books, had given over most of its space to university memorabilia and was dwarfed by the sleek white Apple store next to it.
Having grown up surgically attached to the knee of my writer-bibliophile grandfather, a man who spent his twilight years almost completely ensconced in the library he had built over his 80-year lifespan, I’m not sure how to feel about the trend towards moving everything into the Cloud, transforming leather and pulp into web-links and gigabytes. It was by working through my grandfather’s shelves that I discovered the classics, as well as the works of relatively lesser-known lights — there was the stark searing beauty of the Depression-era Agee, the melodramatic but visceral writing of John Hersey, the minor aimless novels of Nikos Kazantzakis, the awesome precision of Yasunari Kawabata and the morbid fantastic world of Mervyn Peake. It was also by working my way through our convent school library from A to Z that I dealt with the sensitivity and loneliness of my early youth. To me, for a long time, books were more reliable than friends, so much so that a college mate had to grab my arm once and insist that this, her physical touch, meant more than the books I lugged to and from my room. Maybe, deep inside, I still actually disagree with her. At any given time, there are three or four books on my night table, usually there is one tucked under my pillow or swimming somewhere in my sheets. When it came time, recently, to choose between an e-version of the memoir of my mentor who had passed away last winter, I chose the hard-bound copy over the digital version, feeling, maybe, that in holding a physical copy of his book, I was holding a piece of him.
My grandfather once told me that by instilling in me a love for books he was ensuring me the ability to tap a happiness that would survive the vicissitudes of life. Even if you end up a janitor, he said, your love of books will ensure you a lifetime of joy — borrowing books is free! My father sometimes mentions the burden of taking care of the library my grandfather left, a collection which he is nonetheless pathologically adding greatly to, mostly with books on politics and war, and to which I have added, to his chagrin, my own small collection of children’s books and young adult novels. I like to think that the effort of preserving the family library is worthwhile, reflecting, as it will in the end, the idiosyncratic taste of several generations of writers. I like to fantasize that one of my nieces and nephews or maybe even someone totally unrelated to us will get to trail their hands over those meticulously chosen and preserved spines, pick a book at random and begin to develop an ear for great writing and nurture their own unique voice.
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