HOW I GOT RID OF FIVE HUNDRED BOOKS
The misanthrope: The sun is good only for reviving the flies that suck my blood.
Poet: Don’t make a present of your book; destroy it yourself.
Several years ago I read an essay by some English author — I don’t recall which one — who told about the difficulties he encountered in getting rid of a parcel of books he was no longer interested in owning. Now, over the years, I have observed that intellectuals often complain that their books eventually force them out of house and home. Some even justify the size of their seignorial mansions with the excuse that they could not turn around in their old apartments because there were so many books. I have not been, and probably never will be, in so extreme a situation, but I never could have imagined that one day I would find myself in the position of the English essayist, struggling to divest myself of five hundred volumes.
I will try to give an account of my experience. Let me say in passing that the story will probably irritate many readers. It doesn’t matter. The truth is that at a certain point in your life you either know too many people (writers), or too many people (writers) know you, or you realize that you happen to live at a time when too many books are published. The moment comes when your writer friends have presented you with so many books (excluding the unpublished manuscripts they generously give you to read) that you would need to devote every day in the year to learning their interpretations of the world, of life. As if that were not enough, the fact is that for the past twenty years my passion for reading has been contaminated by the habit of buying books, a habit that, sadly, is often confused with reading. Twenty years ago I was foolish enough to begin visiting secondhand bookstores. On the first page of Moby Dick, Ishmael observes that when Cato wearied of life he committed suicide by throwing himself on his sword, and that when Ishmael happened to feel the same weariness, he simply boarded a ship. I, on the other hand, spent many years following the route of secondhand bookstores. When you begin to feel the attraction of these establishments filled with dust and spiritual penury, the pleasure derived from books has begun to degenerate into a mania for buying them, and this in turn becomes pride in acquiring some rare volume that will astonish your friends or mere acquaintances.
How does this process take place? One day you are peacefully reading in your house when a friend drops by and says: “What a lot of books you have!” This sounds to you as if he were saying: “How intelligent you are!” and the damage has been done. You know the rest. You begin to count your books by the hundreds, then by the thousands, and feel more and more intelligent. As the years pass (unless you really are a poor unfortunate idealist) you generally have greater economic resources at your disposal, have frequented more bookstores, and naturally, have become a writer and consequently own so many books you are no longer simply intelligent: At heart you are a genius. This is at the root of your pride in owning many books.
Finding myself in this situation, I mustered my courage the other day and decided to keep only those books that really interested me, or that I had read, or was really going to read. As he consumes his ration of life, how many truths does a man avoid? Isn’t his own cowardice one of the most constant of these? How many times a day do you turn to sophistries in order to hide from yourself the fact that you are a coward? I am a coward. Of the several thousand books that I own through inertia, I had the courage to eliminate no more than a scant five hundred, and even that was painful, not because of what they represented spiritually for me, but because of the diminished prestige that ten meters less of filled bookshelves would signify. Day and night, my eyes turned again and again (as the classics would say) to the long rows, selecting and choosing to the point of exhaustion (as we moderns say). What an incredible amount of poetry, of novels, of sociological solutions to the ills of the world! One supposes that poetry is written to enrich the spirit; that novels have been conceived, at the very least, to entertain us; and even, optimistically, that sociological solutions are a guide to solving something. Viewing the situation calmly, I realized that the first (poetry) was capable of impoverishing the richest spirit, the second of boring the most joyful, the third of confusing the most lucid. And yet what careful consideration I gave to discarding any of the volumes, no matter how insignificant it seemed. If a priest and a barber had helped me without my knowing it, would there be more than a hundred books left on my shelves? In 1955, when I visited Pablo Neruda in his house in Santiago, I was surprised to see that he had only thirty or forty books, mainly detective novels and translations of his own work into various languages. He had just donated an enormous number of true bibliographical treasures to the University. The poet allowed himself that pleasure while he was alive — the only time, come to think of it, when one can.
I will not make a complete survey here of the books I was prepared to give away, but there was a little of everything, more or less as follows: politics (in the bad sense of the word, if indeed it has any other), about 50; sociology and economics, approximately 49; general geography and general history, 3; geography and history of specific nations, 48; world literature, 14; Latin American literature, 86, North American studies of Latin American literature, 37; astronomy, 1; rhythmic theories (so that madam does not become pregnant), 6; methods for finding water, 1; biographies of opera singers, 1; indefinable genres (for instance, I Chose Freedom), 14; erotica, 1/2 (I kept the illustrations in the only one I had); methods for losing weight, 1; methods for giving up drinking, 19; psychology and psychoanalysis, 27; grammars, 5; methods for speaking English in ten days, 1; methods for speaking French in ten days, 1; methods for speaking Italian in ten days, 1; cinematic studies, 8; etcetera.
But this was merely the beginning. I soon learned that few people were willing to accept most of the books I had so painstakingly bought over the years at so great a cost in time and money. Although discovering that acquisitiveness was not a universal aberration reconciled me somewhat to the human race, it caused its own discomforts, for once I had made up my mind, getting rid of those books became a compelling spiritual necessity. A fire like the one that burned the Library of Alexandria, a blaze to which these recollections are dedicated, is the easiest path to follow, but it seems ridiculous, and even indecent, to burn five hundred books in the courtyard of your house (assuming that your house has a courtyard). Though people accept the fact that the Inquisition burned people, most become indignant at the burning of books. Certain people who are passionate about such things suggested that I donate all those volumes to some public library or other; but so simple a solution weakened the spirit of adventure involved in the enterprise, and I found it a rather tiresome idea; besides, I was convinced the books would serve as little purpose in public libraries as they did in my house or anywhere else. Tossing them one by one into the trash was not worthy of me, or the books, or the garbage collector. My friends were the only solution. But my political or sociological friends already owned the books that corresponded to their fields of specialization, or in many cases, held inimical beliefs; the poets did not want to be contaminated by the works of their contemporaries whom they knew personally; and the erotic book, even stripped of its French illustrations, would be a burden to anyone.