The Books
1. Every so often my mother, an inveterate reader, would start to talk about a book she was reading and we, her listeners, would be astonished. A book about the foreign exchange market comes to mind, also something about gardening by the stars. What? Why are you reading THAT? someone would say. Her reply was always the same: “I’m rearranging the furniture in my mind.”
2. I am a person who likes to rearrange the furniture in a room, or the paintings and photographs on the wall. I don’t do it with any regularity, but more often than some. It is therapeutic, moving my desk to the other side of the window, yet I seldom think of that until later. I have also moved to a new home many times. That rearranges everything, though it is not the same at all.
3. Ruth Ozeki has a new novel. The Book of Form and Emptiness, a title that is in some ways as obscure to me as it was before I finished the 546 pages. I am devoted to this writer, kind of wildly devoted, so 546 pages didn’t phase me. The book is about a kid named Benny, a Japanese-American boy who begins to hear voices after his father Kenji, a jazz clarinetist, is struck and killed by a truck carrying crates of live chickens. Benny does not hear voices the way we might assume. The voices Benny hears are the voices of objects: scissors, T-shirts, the blue pills he is given on the psych ward, a pink flowered teapot his mother loves,
and books. There is an entire book inside of Ozeki’s book, it is called The
Book. The narrator of The Book tells Benny’s story, which is also told in other
ways.
4. I decided ahead of time that two big built-in bookcases, which already housed quite a few books, offered all the space in our modest apartment that I could give to the books that would arrive in the move from NYC to Massachusetts. This is the twelfth time we have moved; perhaps it is the last time. Anyway, there were fourteen boxes of books. I’m sure of the number because midway in the move, about 7:30 on an interminable evening when the temperature hovered between 16 and 17 degrees, the elevator broke. When the boxes eventually made it up five flights of stairs it was obvious that the designated bookcases could not possibly accommodate all those newcomers. The dilemma was piercing. On each of the other moves, all eleven of them, I have culled my books. These boxes contained no books from grad school, for example, not one single one of those fat classic texts in anthropology. Perhaps those old friends are living somewhere else, in some student lounge at Wesleyan where my partner taught, or in a used bookstore around the corner from our place in the East Village. But this predicament concerned the books that had just arrived.
5. Who cares about my problem of too many books? Or about the furniture in my mother’s mind? Well, I know that books furnish my mind, so does my mother’s voice. (Don’t you sometimes hear your mother’s words coming out of your mouth?) Benny’s mother, Abigail, is a hoarder; I won’t spoil the story by describing what she keeps. When pressed by the authorities to clean out her house so that Benny can come home from the hospital Abigail tries, she really tries, until she can’t take it. Then she backs up against the kitchen wall and shouts at the well-meaning people carting everything away: “Stop, Stop, you can’t take that stuff – that stuff is my life.”
6. People say that the world gets smaller as we get old. I admit that that is happening to me now, but sometimes I resist. I cannot buy more bookcases because I refuse in my seventies to make this lovely small home even smaller than it is. So what about the fourteen boxes? I can sense which particular books I will have to keep when I pick them up in my hands. It’s what Abigail said: certain books, the ones that are speaking to me, are my life. But what will happen to the rest of them, to the books that will have to go? I will have to hold them in my mind.
7. Ruth Ozeki was talking with Ezra Klein on his podcast the other day and, by lucky accident, I got to listen. I wanted the author to talk with Klein about this complicated book, including The Book about Benny inside her book, and why Benny sometimes lived in the library, and more. But no. Instead, although it is all connected for her, Ozeki spoke about her belief that objects have agency. She is a serious Buddhist. Benny, no Buddhist, also believes that insentient beings are alive: he hears them speaking. Ozeki might say that wherever they land, the books I discard will simply be moving on to the next plane. I thought that the books I had no room for might perhaps find a place in the library, as Benny did when he left his home. I pestered the guy at the circulation desk at the Forbes Library in town until he finally said “Oh okay, bring your books -- but only one grocery bag.” Then, as I was coming up the stone steps to the library the brown paper bag broke open and the books spilled out. A nice woman offered to help me pick everything up. She was kind and my fingers were red with cold but I said no. I would be the one to handle the books that were departing.
8. At the end of the podcast Ozeki told the story of clearing out her parents’ house after they had died. They were extremely frugal people, not hoarders but they had sustained themselves in a Japanese internment camp in Arizona. Their kitchen drawers contained envelopes stuffed with scraps of blank paper, balls made from hundreds of tightly wound rubber bands, and reused aluminum foil, the creases smoothed out of each shiny square. Ozeki suffered over her task, fingering the items one by one even as she understood that they would have to be discarded. Nearing the end she found a small cardboard carton, so old that its edges were crumbling. She heaved a sigh, phew, relieved that that certainly could go – and then she noticed that the box had a label. The label was lettered in black ink in her mother’s hand, first in Japanese, then in English. The English script on the label said “Empty Box.” Ozeki, the writer/daughter, now has a dedicated shelf, one entire shelf in a bookcase in her house, where she keeps the Empty Box.
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Nancy Barnes is a cultural anthropologist and teacher who has now begun to write personal essays and stories. Her work has been published in Hippocampus, Harpur Palate, Pangyrus and other journals. A native New Yorker, she and her partner divide their time between NYC and Northampton, MA.