On the book supplement of de Volkskrant a photo of the Irish writer Colm Tóibin recently stood in front of his bookcase. A photo as you so often see, a literate person in front of a bookcase. And as always, I immediately started looking at the bookcase: what do you see on it, what is in it? This was clearly a literary bookcase, many thinner books with also a few thick ones, but no series, no bibliophilia, no reference works, cookbooks, art books. Some rows were hanging a bit crooked, something had clearly been removed, on the floor in front of the cupboards there were piles (Careful! then you think about it, don’t do that! They will grow and then you’ll have to deal with it!) on the edge of the desk also books and papers, the disorderly piles of someone who is busy with something or wants to be, with more things at the same time, things that are not always up to date or are not being completed.
While I was watching this, I noticed once again that foreign bookcases mean less to you and that therefore the whole pretense of the ‘Republic of Letters’, as if it really is an alliance from all over the world, is indeed what it is. word says: pretension, I also noticed that I no longer take the same pleasure in the sight of such a bookcase as I used to. Some shame has crept in. Previously I felt joyfully a certain kinship or not (What! Is he reading that?), but now I get the feeling that I am looking at something that is actually over: overcrowded bookcases. There may even be poetry collections in there.
What kind of silly shame is that? It now seems a bit embarrassing, unworldly perhaps, to live like this in or from your bookcase. Old-fashioned too. Perhaps an exaggeration, because let’s be honest, have you read all that? No. Not all. And are you going to (re)read all that? Certainly not. But you don’t know what is and what isn’t, and that’s not the point.
I take Borges’ poems off the bookshelf to compare the recent translations of Paul Claes with those of Barber van de Pol and Maarten Steenmeijer, and with those of Robert Lemm, wondering in which form he speaks and reads to me most, leafing through his poems, of course immediately finding out all about books. There is a poem about a guardian of books who tells what is in those books: gardens, temples, truths about the world. ‘Why deceive myself?/The truth is I never knew how to read’. Yet the books are gardens and temples. It is not unimportant to know that Borges himself became blind and eventually could no longer read.
In another poem (‘My books’) he writes that all those books do not know that he exists, except perhaps those that he himself wrote, but that ‘my essential words’ are not there, but on those other pages, which not know of its existence. “It’s better this way.” Your books know nothing about you, but say everything about you. From you.
In a lecture, Borges once said that despite his blindness he continued to fill his house with books, including an edition of the Brockhaus encyclopedia he had received as a gift: “I felt the presence of that book in my house, I felt it as a kind of happiness. ”
Ah, how nice it is to have a bookcase with Borges in it. He lifts you from the embarrassment, from the oppressive self-invented judgment of being past, to the happiness of the words. The happiness of the bookcase.