My husband, Haywood, reached retirement age this summer, but instead of actually retiring, he decided to stay on and teach part time. I work from home, alone in a silent house, and I am thrilled to have more time with the person I like best in all the world. The only downside was his stuff. When it’s time to give up his classroom, what does a veteran English teacher do with 37 years’ worth of posters and three-ring binders and author photos and various bringing-literature-to-life aids? What does he do with all the books?
Whatever teaching materials his colleagues couldn’t use, Haywood brought home, along with all the books, to a house already piled to the rafters with the belongings we inherited when our parents died. It was no big deal to hang the pictures in my husband’s home office, to lean the “Moby Dick”-era harpoon in a corner, but the books stymied us. Every bookcase in the house — and there are a lot of bookcases in this house — was already stuffed beyond budging.
One son and his sweetheart carried off three large cartons, mostly duplicates of books we already owned. The rest of the classroom books sat in boxes while we tried to figure out what to do with them.
People have been arguing that print is dead, or about to be dead, for at least half my husband’s teaching career. It is not dead in this house. We write in books. We dogear pages and underline passages and draw little stars in the margins. To read a book after my husband has read it is to have a window into his curious and wide-ranging mind.
Before the objections commence, let me say that I am 100 percent in favor of every kind of reading there is: e-books, audiobooks, Braille books, graphic books, you name it. I’m for it all.
My husband and all three of our children borrow audiobooks and e-books by the hundreds from our public library. They read on various electronic devices, moving seamlessly from laptop to e-reader to phone app. It’s much more convenient than what I do, which is carry books around in my bag, from which they sometimes leave and do not return. How many books have I lost in airports? I once lost two copies of Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Overstory,” one right after another, on the same book tour. Thank heaven for airport bookshops.
I’m aware that a novel is not a thing. A poem is not a thing. Whether a story or a poem or an essay or an argument comes in through your ears or your eyes or your fingertips doesn’t change the alchemy that happens in reading: the melding of writer and reader, one human heart in communion with another, and with all the others, past, present, and future, who have read the same book. That magic is unrelated to the delivery system of a text. It happens whenever and however a person reads.
Nevertheless.
I will always prefer a book I can hold in my hand, the kind that smells of paper and glue, the kind whose unfolding I control, no button or touchscreen involved, by flipping backward and forward with pages ruffling between my fingers. The physicality of it pleases me. I listen to audiobooks on solo road trips, but I always switch back to the physical book as soon as I unpack. Reading a book on paper feels slower — calmer, stiller — than encountering any digital text.
For me, a book made of paper will always be a beautiful object that warms a room even as it expands (or entertains, or challenges, or informs, or comforts) a mind, and a bookcase will always represent time itself. I walk past one of our bookcases, and I can tell you exactly why a particular book is still there, never culled as space grew limited, even if there is no chance I’ll ever read it again.
When I reread a book from my own shelves, I meet my own younger self. Sometimes my younger self underlined a passage that I would have reached for my pencil to underline now. Other times she read right past a line that stuns me with its beauty today. I am what I have read far more surely than I am what I have eaten.
By looking at our bookshelves, I can tell you who my husband was, too — the hardly-more-than-a-boy who read “A Brief History of Time” on our honeymoon, the young teacher who learned he was about to be a father by reading the inscription I wrote inside a copy of “The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America,” the doting son who memorized Irish toasts to please his aging father, who still had cousins back in the old country. To walk past our bookcases is to make a different study of the history of time.
So when the schoolbooks came home from Haywood’s classroom, all we could do was build more bookcases and shoehorn them into his home office. They are likely to be the last bookshelves we will ever build. There is no room in this house for more, and the next house will be smaller. Too small for all these books. Almost certainly too small for sentimentality in any form.
In the meantime, our books ensure that I am still surrounded by all the selves I have ever been, and all the selves my mate has been, and the selves our children were when we held them in our laps and read aloud from the poetry collection I gave my husband when our oldest son was on the way. In that book are some of the same poems my father read aloud to me as a child.
Just as she did then, just as she did again when our sons were young and again whenever anyone opens that book now, Emily Dickinson is right there explaining how a book is a chariot “That bears the human soul.”
However capacious her own inimitable soul, Emily Dickinson could not have conceived of a book that exists in paperback, much less as an mp3 or digital download. Even recognizing them as books, I will always have trouble warming to such forms myself. I prefer the messy shelves, the dogeared pages, the notes inscribed in a familiar hand. Someday, long from now, a child may open a book of poems and find the note I wrote to her grandfather on the flyleaf: “For Haywood, to read aloud (beginning in about nine months).” Maybe she will save it, too.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.