Wednesday, September 13, 2006
So: Eulogy for books
By Jocy L. So
Unraveling
WHEN I was in Grade Three, my teachers encouraged me to read. It started with Archie's comic books, then Nancy Drew mysteries, before graduating to Sweet Dreams love stories and Agatha Christie books in high school. I remember afternoons in Velasco bookstore where I would browse through the meager book collection, trying to figure out which Agatha mystery to add to my collection next.
I like slowly flipping through a book in front of my nose so I can inhale deeply the distinct aroma of printed pages. A friend caught me doing this once and thought it weird, but I know many bookworms who lovingly smell and touch their prized books.
I fell in love with books: a beautifully crafted phrase, a few choice words that could capture a broad thought, characters so real you want to meet them, fall in love with them, be like them, stories that could suck you in so effectively you see yourself in it, writing so powerful it makes you pause and think, propelling you to get a pen and underlining the words, ideas so remarkable it changes the way you view yourself and the world.
Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote, "The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books." And that was true for me. Books opened up a vista of worlds, taking me away from my mundane life and small room into Renaissance Italy, Victorian London, 1960s New York, or even the distant future. But books also allowed me respite away from daily worries. Reading allowed me my private and personal time, a time when I can just curl up in bed, immersing myself in a story.
Before there was a National Bookstore in Davao, I'd yearn to go to Manila for the sole purpose of browsing through a "real" bookstore, one where the books outnumbered school supplies. I would spend hours glancing at titles and covers, reading the blurbs, and figuring out which one I'd purchase with the money I saved. Clothes, accessories, make-up, even shoes do not hold as much power over my pocket as a book. In bookstores, time can flow unhampered. My favorite memory of the World Trade Center, is spending hours in the bookstore at its lower levels, sitting by the windows, a pile of books to leisurely look through on my side and periodically glancing down at people walking to and fro the building.
Yes, I love my books. So imagine my horror last night upon discovering that termites had eaten through around a third of my books. I don't know when it started. I had just cleaned the cabinet that contained my books last summer and even made "library cards" for each book. And now, my favorite books resemble a war zone, with holes, bunkers, tunnels and dirt. My entire Agatha Christie collection, gathered over a decade and from various travels, EM Forster's "Where Angels Fear to Tread," which I found in a small, dim, old bookstore tucked away in the winding streets of Vienna, Towanda and "Fried Green Tomatoes," which my former roommate recommended during one Spring Break, and Paulo Coelho's books which helped me through the misery of working alone in the US, are now filled with translucent white termites, their pages eaten beyond comprehension.
I don't know what I felt surveying the damage last night. I wanted to cry, not for the wasted money spent to purchase those books, but for what those books meant in various points of my life. I wanted to burn them as well, disgusted at the sight of multitudes of termites. I wanted to douse the entire collection with insecticide, never mind if I destroy more books long as I kill every little monster. It seemed too much of an effort to rescue the books. In the end, my brother became my voice of reason. He told me to take down the untouched books, and together we slowly figured which ones are too far-gone to be rescued and which books are still all right.
A third of the books are gone. I am still sad, but at the same time, relieved. A friend reminded me that 2/3 remain. Another said that in a sense, they are just books, things, material possessions. It's not the book itself that is important, but the impression it has left on me.
The past months have been rife with incidents of destruction: a massive oil spill off Guimaras, the nursing board exam fiasco, the wars in Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq. Marine life, shorelines, dreams of working abroad, homes, and lives, destroyed by insidious human acts of cruelty and selfishness. We are like termites too, eating away what other people hold precious. But the destruction of the things we hold dear also remind us of the resilience of the human spirit, that even if a giant wave wipes away an entire village or terrorists obliterate two towering buildings, even if we lose our money, houses, possessions, what is important is what we have left-our ability to move on, our ability to hope in the future and believe that there are better things coming, more books to discover, savor, and treasure.
(Jocy L. So teaches at Davao Christian High School where she discovered the joy in reading)
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