On any given day I’m likely to be working here at home, hunched over this keyboard, typing Great Thoughts and Beautiful Sentences—or so they seem at the time, like those beautifully flecked and iridescent stones one finds at the seashore that gradually dry into dull gray pebbles. Anyway, I’ll be working steadily along when suddenly, as D. H. Lawrence remarked at the beginning of Sea and Sardinia, there “comes over one an absolute necessity to move.”
I’ll then hop into the car and drive to the Friends of the Montgomery County Library bookstore in Wheaton or the Second Story Books Warehouse in Rockville or Wonder Book and Video in Frederick. I’ll poke around. Time will pass. And three hours later I’ll realize that, oops, I really need to get back home to check over the proof of a review, or reheat some leftovers—I’m no cook—before my Beloved Spouse comes wearily trudging through the backdoor. Yet by the time I pull out of the bookstore’s parking lot it is almost invariably rush hour and I will inch painfully along the clotted roadways of greater Washington, frustrated that I should live in this hellhole.
But, ah, those three hours or so of wandering the shelves, pulling out interesting-looking titles, checking prices, trying to remember if I already own this book or that and, if I do, whether I really owe it to myself to upgrade to an incredibly pretty copy for only $5. Before long, my one or two books is a stack, then a boxful. Should I, perhaps, put back a few? Naaah. You only live once. Besides, with any justice, Heaven itself will resemble a vast used bookstore, with a really good café in one corner, serving coffee and Guinness and kielbasa to keep up one’s strength while browsing, and all around will be the kind of angels usually found in Victoria’s Secret catalogs. All my old friends will be there and sometimes we’ll take off a few millennia for an epic poker game and. . . .
To continue: it’s true that even $5 book purchases do add up. Yet what, after all, is money? It’s just this abstraction, a number, a piece of green paper. But a book—a printed volume, not some pixels on a screen—is real. You can hold it in your hand. Feel its heft. Admire the cover. Realize that you now own a work of art that is 50 or 75 or 100 years old. Bernard Berenson is, on a grander scale, any collector’s semblable and frère.
Not that I have BB’s gift for periodically raking in millions of lire by “authenticating” a Giorgione or Tintoretto for art dealer Joseph Duveen. In fact, my Beloved Spouse constantly berates me for failing to stew sufficiently about money. When she tells me to send in my quarterly taxes or deposit cash in my IRA, I do as she says—I am nothing if not uxorious—or I work really hard to accumulate the savings so that I can do so ASAP. For 30 years I diligently set aside every extra penny to cover the college educations of my three sons. I paid off my home mortgage long ago. I even have some kind of mutual fund.
Nonetheless, it’s hard for me to feign even mild interest in investing or studying the stock market. What a weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable—okay, make that profitable—way of life it is to think constantly about the bottom line. Keogh plans, Roths, Schedule C, deferred income, capital gains, and rows and rows of little numbers. . . . The heart sinks.
Sometimes I try to care, I really do. But show me an old issue of Weird Tales and the latest Bank of America Annual Report, and you’ll see where my eyes turn. Of course, both publications deal in fiction, but the lies of art are more honorable than those of plutocratic and deceitful scuzzbags. (Ah, freedom of speech—you got to love it!)
Still, I’m an American, and so can’t help but sometimes wish I were lolling in the “one percent.” But for me, the cost of even trying to become rich is just too high. Some people can balance the two cultures, artists like Picasso or writers like science fiction’s Robert Silverberg who are able to keep track of their portfolios while also creating moving works of art. Sad to say, such multitasking, any multitasking, is beyond me. I read one book at a time all the way through. If I’m reviewing a novel or biography, I then have to write the review before I start my next project. I particularly hate any interruption to what one might laughably call my train of thought. After all, my trains of thought don’t precisely resemble the Acela skimming along to New York so much as the Little Engine That Could huffing and puffing up a steep incline.
Most days I’m irrationally content simply turning pages and fingering keyboards. Essayist Logan Pearsall Smith—Berenson’s brother-in-law—once remarked, “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” I wouldn’t go that far. As Chaucer’s wife of Bath remarked,
But, Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me
Upon my yowthe and on my jolitee,
It tikleth me aboute myn herte roote.
Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote
That I have had my world, as in my tyme.
As I say, even now when I grow foggy-headed or restless, I still hop right into that car of mine and ride around the world—they call me the wanderer, yeah, the wanderer, I roam around, around, around. . . . Hmm, I seem to have flashed backed there to the ’60s. Dion on the radio, that night in the Admiral King High School parking lot with. . . . Sigh.
Truth be told, I know I should be more mature and think seriously about my future and make better preparations for whatever dark days await. Naïvely, though, I keep hoping there won’t be any really dark days. My ideal farewell to this wicked, wonderful world of books and art and beauty and people was long ago summed up by Edmund Wilson in To the Finland Station, his superb account of 19th-century socialism. Its greatest chapter is titled “Karl Marx Dies at His Desk.” That’s the way to go.