Books stand out in particularly high relief when you’re traveling because during those moments of displacement they also provide a kind of mooring. It’s why our memories of what we read when we travel stick with us well after details of the trip itself fade. We remember what we read on the plane, on that beach, in that secluded cabin.
When I look at the characters gathered in my Book of Books from my twenties, my years of solo travel and perpetual singledom, it’s hard to feel like I’d ever truly been alone. In France, I’d had Yossarian and Lucie Manette and Becky Sharp and poor Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin. I had my author friends: Gogol and Carrie Fisher and Colette and Arthur Schlesinger and Art Spiegelman. Each place was populated by its own memorable company. In Thailand there were Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba, Bartleby and Ethan Frome and Jeeves; Daniel Boorstin and Martha Gellhorn and Jack London and Edith Wharton; my fellow travelers Ian Buruma, Jan Morris, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and Pico Iyer. And so on with my subsequent travels. They provided companionship.
Browsing through Bob’s pages, as I do when trying to recollect a moment, a feeling, an earlier incarnation of myself, I can immediately recall, for example, reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History inside the Summer Palace of the Chinese emperor in Beijing, ignoring everything else around me—the sights, the then intensely blue sky over Beijing before smog overtook the city. My story took place inside my own invented world, one that Donna Tartt started, and that I made complete. This is where I really was. When I think back to that afternoon, what I remember is less the gold and red and blue painted bridges and the ornate gardens that surrounded me and more the rush of excitement that I felt as I accompanied Tartt’s scheming coterie of murderous college students. I carried the book with me everywhere I went in Beijing and into bed at night, following Tartt’s characters. I knew exactly where I was and I didn’t feel alone at all.
CHAPTER 13
The Wisdom of the Body
In Love with a Book
Sometimes you fall so much in love with a book that you simply have to tell everyone, to spread the love and to explain the state you’re in. You read passages aloud to anyone who will listen. You wait with bated breath, watching for signs of appreciation, wanting that smile, that laugh, that nod of recognition. Please love this book too, you silently—and sometimes not so silently—urge. You become insistent, even messianic in your enthusiasm.
And sometimes you fall in love with a person, and you’re pretty much the same way. Everyone needs to know about him and appreciate him and admire him—and you for being the one to have found him. You need the love to radiate in every possible direction. That person, more than all other people, must appreciate you and all your attendant objects of love, your stories, your authors, your characters, just as you appreciate him. So he can know you and understand you. You want to enter his secret world, and let him into yours.
To allow someone into my Book of Books would be a true test of intimacy, and trust. There, in those pages, after all, were my fleeting passions and yearnings, my literary crushes, my love life on the page. Some of it demanded explanation. Without annotation, there was no demarking the books I’d hated from the ones I’d admired, books I’d misunderstood, books I’d disliked intensely. All of it was just laid out there, at once revealing and yet open to misinterpretation. Someone would have to really know me to understand.
Though I’d never shown him to anyone, I’d told a few people about Bob in the past. This turned out to be a dicey proposition. Not everyone loved my Book of Books. “Tallying up books like the ticking off of accomplishments,” one boyfriend said accusingly, as if I’d admitted to quantifying parental love or indexing my inner beauty. “Hurry up, go note it in Bob,” he’d gibe every time I closed a book, as if the act of recording invalidated the entire experience. Were the books truly being read for their own sake or in pursuit of some goal that sullied the entire enterprise?
“What does this tell you if you don’t remember anything about the books themselves?” another beau asked, suggesting an expanded Bob with a page for my impressions of each book in its stead. This Bigger Bob lasted for two books, the relationship not much longer. “You’re not seriously going to allow books on tape, are you?” wondered a third, scornfully. Competition, jealousy, misunderstandings, risk. Perhaps it wasn’t worth the bother.
It wasn’t until my midtwenties, when I’d met the person I would marry, that I truly opened Bob up to someone else. I had never been one of the girls who’d always had a boyfriend; the right guys always seemed to be with someone else. I ended up with the wrong guys, the ones who didn’t get me or whom I didn’t get, and we usually broke up hastily as a consequence.
This guy was different. There was nothing to prove to him; he loved me for who I was. He loved me no matter what. And I knew he would love Bob, too. There was no way he would be put off by my Book of Books because he was unquestionably much better read; moreover, he actually remembered what he read. Here was someone who had actually finished his Plato and Hobbes and Locke; for him, the Norton Anthology was a footnote. Marrying him would be like uploading an entirely new database to my brain.
When we met, I was reading Sherwin Nuland’s surgeon’s-eye view of human biology, The Wisdom of the Body. Bodies were on my mind because at that time, by some terrible misunderstanding, I’d been put to work on the Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar—without doubt, a professional nadir.
I was twenty-six, living in Brooklyn, and had just started working at Time Inc. with great expectation, leaping from the child’s playpen of Scholastic Inc.’s downtown headquarters, where I’d worked for three years, to the big-boys’ club in the midtown Time-Life Building. After all my angsting over what to do with my life, I’d wound up moving back from Thailand to New York, abandoning a plan to switch over to Hong Kong, and taking a half-editorial, half-marketing job in publishing when it materialized during a pre-Internet visit to my old stomping ground, the college alumni services office. Miraculously, this job paid well enough that I could afford to live with just one roommate in the East Village, which was possible back when you could rent a room in Manhattan for four hundred dollars a month.