The other morning I was re-considering my old question. Which is, “Why did people I know vote to damage our country?” And it popped into my head: their houses don’t have bookshelves with books in them.
All of the houses and apartments I’ve lived in during my life had a wall of shelves containing books. Since shelves have their limits no matter how we pile up the books, there are sad necessary times when bookshelves must be culled. Books gets taken to somebody’s basement or donated to the library or used book stores. Years later, I’ve had to re-purchase some of those books because of life and work and research and memory.
Then a time came — maybe in the ’70s or ’80s — when something happened. The telling incident involved my brother. He’d been recommending a terrific historical trilogy on the Civil War by Shelby Foote, urging me to read it, and I kept saying, “After I finish what I’m reading now.”
Then one day he appeared, holding three, big, hardcover books. The Foote trilogy. I looked at the books and had an epiphany. “You’ve run out of bookshelf space,” I said. And he admitted it, yes, but anyway I should read them. “I’m not ready for them yet.” I made him take them home.
Shortly thereafter I discovered that everyone I knew who had a lot of books had run out of shelf space at the same time. I envisioned a ton of books circling in the air above New York like jumbo jets over JFK, searching for somewhere to land.
This is a problem that should happen to everyone you know. As someone on Bluesky wrote the other day, “Don’t trust anyone who doesn’t have a lot of bookshelves.” A house without books is the Mark of MAGA.