The Bookshelf Embodied

A Father, a Daughter, and the Shared Language of Books

I was going to write about my mother’s bag of rocks in the trunk of my car. But first, I want to tell you about something else from Sunday morning at my parents’ home of 40 years, where my middle sister and I had gone to walk, once again, through the rooms, labeling what goes with them when they move to an independent living facility next fall, what goes with one of us or our older sister, and what will go away altogether.

After we finished our intended task, I stayed a while to help my Dad. Mostly I’ve been doing this kind of thing with my Mom so this felt special in the same way solo time with my Dad felt special when I was a kid.

I remember him sitting with me and building a gnome house, or us reading “Frog and Toad,” my favorite, and another favorite, “Amos & Boris.” I remember occasional trips to Syms, a men’s clothing store in a Buffalo suburb where he would take me or my sisters now and then, maybe stopping for a rare McDonald's Happy Meal on the way home. I remember him picking me up from day camp one August afternoon in 1984 and telling me his mother had died (from pancreatic cancer). I remember not knowing what to say as we sat in the car at the bottom of the gravel driveway on Harkness Road, so I asked, “When?” I remember going to Queens with him not long after – I’m sure the whole family went but I only remember me and him, standing on a train platform. 

I texted M.J. that I was staying for a bit to help my Dad empty a tall bookshelf in his study, the one I’m going to put in my new home office when we move this weekend. (Everyone is moving at once!) But autocorrect changed the text to say, “I am helping my Dad embody a bookshelf…” which struck me immediately as both accurate and appropriate.

At one point, as he painstakingly selected which books went in a giveaway pile and which he would keep for now, I suggested he could ask himself, “Is this a book I will miss and think about if it’s no longer here?” And he said, “I literally have hundreds of books that fit into that category.” A few minutes later, he came upon a slim volume, “What We See When We Read,” by Peter Mendelsund. “I love this book! I’ve been looking for this! This is my favorite book!” He seemed like an excited schoolboy. (A few days later when I asked him to email the title, he added that the book’s dedication says, "For my daughters.")

Now, to hear my Dad say he has a favorite book is rather astonishing; here is a scholar and voracious reader who has amassed thousands of books in his lifetime, many of which he could tell you about in great detail, many of which he has written reviews of or essays about. Seeing him light up like that was a little magical.

Then he gestured at the shelves on two of the walls of the room that was once my bedroom and said, “The thing is, at some point, you have to change your whole life. You just can’t take all of this” – he waved at the piles of books. “At 82 years old, it’s time to just enjoy life.”

He sounded lighter already, which says a lot for someone with a reputation for being serious. (I get my “Schwartz eyebrow” from him – the left one raised ever so slightly, two arc-shaped wrinkles above it that become more pronounced when we are stressed or tired.)

I scanned the titles on the stack right in front of me: “Trauma: Explorations in Memory,” “Trauma and the Human Experience,” “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History,” “Catastrophe and Meaning.” Are you beginning to get a picture? I thought back on all the years I would stand in front of his bookshelves, awash in Holocaust studies and psychoanalytic topics. I remembered how I would randomly pull a handful of books from his shelves in high school – his study was downstairs back then, where my Mom’s is now – and pluck words from the ends of lines without actually reading to form a poem.

Often, those poems made a kind of surprising sense to me. I think I fancied that my subconscious was doing the writing; now, I know this to have been true and find myself reflecting on the similarities with some of my approaches to writing now. There is a certain “from thin air” quality that has remained, one I trust without needing to understand how it works. 

The mere presence of my father’s books was and remains formative for me. In the 30 or so years since I last lived in that house, I have rarely visited without leaving with at least one book, one he will have eagerly gone upstairs to fetch and come down with looking pleased, gleeful even. Or he will have ordered some volume of poetry with me in mind, saying, “I want to read this first and then I’ll give it to you.”

When he hands me some old volume, I accept it whether I think I will end up reading it or not, because it means so much more than the book itself. It means we share this love of learning, of writing, of reading, of the books themselves, the titles, the spines, the stacks, the ocean of knowledge we will never touch the bottom of, full of treasure and debris and danger and potential and beauty.

He laments, “The thing with the internet age is that no one learns to study anymore!”

I nod in agreement, the bookshelf now standing empty, embodied before me, ready for the movers, in the shape of my father. 

I’ll tell you about my mother’s rocks next time.

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