I’m sure writers would rather we sit with their books than with their bodies, but sometimes it’s good to visit the dead. Author’s Ridge at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord beckons with its graves of Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, and Hawthorne. Here lie the writers of the greatest hits of high school English class of the 80s, 90s and beyond.
I feel like Clifton Hillegass, creator of CliffsNotes deserves a place here, too. If I’m going to pay my respects, he should be first up. My graveside chat with Cliff would be fraught, for he gave me insight but he made it hard to hear my own self thinking and wrestling with a difficult text. He was a harbinger of the internet which can make us all consumers of other people’s ideas rather than creators and thinkers.
Cemeteries are fitting places to work out our feelings toward the dead whether with thankful hearts or with animus. Beside the graves on Author’s Ridge, my heart is full of gratitude for these writers but mostly I am overcome with love for books which thankfully live on forever.
Some people think books are dying, or worse, are already six feet under, killed and buried by our phones and our digital addictions. This is simply not true. I know that stories are alive and well in libraries and in bookstores, on bookshelves and bedside tables, in bathrooms and in comfy chairs. The reports on the death of books and reading are greatly exaggerated.
I have always loved books. I don’t really have a story of books saving me or being my comfort in dark times. For me, they are just another miracle of daily life that I get to enjoy like the sky streaked with oranges and pinks on the drive into work or birdsong outside the window while packing lunches in the morning or a cooling breeze at summer’s end. I delight in words, in stories, in seeing myself and others in the pages of a book. My mind is crowded with stories but the wonder of the brain allows for layers upon layers of lives to reside in memory. Like travel, books have allowed me to see how the world lives and loves, thrives and falters, hopes and flails.
(Random House Books)
My reading life has been full of the popular books of the decade. When I was young, I read Sweet Valley High books and the Sweet Dreams series. At some point of boredom, I moved on and picked up Robert Ludlum and Danielle Steele books. For a while I was waylaid by the literary canon in high school and college, busy analyzing and explaining, hunting themes and archetypes, using all my mind muscle to read between lines and more importantly into my teacher’s mind.
Then before I knew it, I was transitioning from CliffsNotes to Clifford and reading Dr. Seuss to my kids while my own reading became sporadic. I remember reading a book of essays called Mothers Who Think that was important to me as I lost some of myself to motherhood. I remember when Amazon was a brand new company, and Chris bought me a book, probably delivered straight from Jeff Bezos’s garage, just in time for Christmas. Neither one of us can remember the title of the book. I’m hoping I wrote it down somewhere in one of my journals and I’ll find it one day.
I was always on the lookout for books even when I didn’t have time to read. One afternoon, I was browsing old books in a thrift store, and I stumbled upon rows and rows of gleaming leather bound books in shades of deep greens, browns, and reds. I pulled one off the shelf admiring the pristine, gilded edges and the whispers of words as I turned the pages. These were the classics but not my own dog-eared paperbacks, highlighted and underlined and stained with my own confusion and wonder. This was someone else’s collection, someone who had died and whose family collected the library and donated it to the thrift store. I pulled a few more off the shelf and realized some of them were signed editions.
I was unprepared to buy the lot, but I wanted them so badly. I don’t know why I wanted them; after all, I am not a fan of books as decoration. But something about these old stories all glammed up sent me running home to tell Chris to find some money. I told him about the books. He did some quick research on Franklin Library Books, and returned with me to the thrift store and grabbed a cart. A cart! We loaded up the dead man’s collection and brought it home. Welty, Melville, Dickens, Hemingway, Styron, and many others would now be our forever companions in all their glory, or so we thought.
They did live with us for a good long while until one year our bills piled so high, we had to sell something. We looked around at all the things we didn’t own and found our only asset to be books. Craigslist was just getting hot at the time, so we put some of the books up for sale. We had a buyer, a book collector from Maryland, come by and offer us much more than we paid at the thrift store. We sold most of them and paid soccer fees, bought back to school clothes, and purchased Emma’s birthday presents. Thankfully, Chris pulled a few of those special, signed edition books aside for us to keep before the dealer arrived at the house. They still sit on our shelves today reminding us of our own stories. Books are a treasure, sometimes literally.
I am grateful there are still plenty of books on our shelves. Often I think I should be buried with them. Just put heaps of books and seashells in the grave with me when I’m gone. Of course, keeping them alive in the world is probably for the best.
I read a book once called Words in Deep Blue about finding love, hope, and healing in a bookstore. One part of the bookstore houses favorite books in which customers can write. They can circle words and lines they love. They can leave notes in the margin or even leave whole letters between the pages creating conversations with strangers or friends. In the book, Rachel begins to understand and believe in transmigration, the movement of a soul from one place to another.
The notes and marks we leave in books are memories of a person. They might even be fragments of a spirit left behind. I hope bits of my soul may end up in a thrift store or if I am really lucky, maybe on the bookshelves of my children and grandchildren.