The memorial service probably wasn’t the best place to talk about Stuart’s bibliophilia. But I couldn’t help myself. I told everyone there about my visits to his home and the reasons why went to pieces.
Stuart was an autodidact, and he had started to surround himself with paper years before I met him. I guess I already knew this fact, but it didn’t prepare me for what I saw when I stepped into his little house on Bellevue: more books, newspapers, maps, journals, magazines, and ephemera than I’d ever seen in one place.
Documents were crammed from floor to ceiling. I thought to myself, maybe the stories about Alexandria burning had been wrong—maybe the greatest library on earth had been hidden away for centuries, then relocated to a 70s split level in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Yet despite the size of Stuart’s collection, not even a quarter of the stuff had been looked at. He told me on more than one occasion that he felt awful about all the unread material. But he still kept gathering fliers and inserts; subscribing to newsletters and bulletins; ordering broadsides and pamphlets; and buying books – lots and lots of books.
For a long time, Stuart assayed a single work at a time. He’d pour over every word in a volume, trace each border of a map, learn a single broadsheet poem by heart before he’d touch anything else. Yet he’d buy two works for each one he finished. Every French novel led to a tome on Napoleonic history and a set of palace floor plans. Each presidential biography turned him on to a collection of letters and the memoir of a first lady.
While Stuart kept up a heroic pace, he couldn’t stay on top of his ever-expanding reading list. The piles of paper mounted higher and higher: grimoires in the corners, French glossaries atop the toilet, Roman tragedies in the unused oven.
Worried he was falling behind in his pursuit of enlightenment, Stuart decided to modify his approach: he began to tackle multiple projects at once, reading works in pieces. Soon, volumes of poetry lay cracked open upon his kitchen table. Sheets of newspaper (from three or four years back) were spread under every chair. Plays in ancient languages he hadn’t completely mastered covered the couch. Colorful picture books carpeted the foyer floor.
His place looked like a bookstore would if it were caught in a tornado and flipped over a few times.
All the while, Stuart continued to add to his collection so there were always new unopened boxes jammed between all the piles of paper. Near the end, he never completed anything, just kept tackling different readings, always in fragments, all the while ordering more.
His addiction, he said, was like life: never-ending. Still, Stuart complained he felt terribly. He began to suspect that he’d never get through everything.
And the more he read, the more ignorant he felt. He compared himself to Sisyphus, Tantalus, and Ixion, growing increasingly frustrated and despondent.
The last time I saw him, Stuart was positively desperate. He swore that he was going to make a radical change, to end his addiction once and for all.
As I told everyone at the memorial service, I really wish he hadn’t tried to quit reading cold turkey.
I really wish he’d taken the time to finish the safety instructions for that industrial grade shredder he bought to solve his problems.
Still, I suppose that after a fashion, it did just that.
©2009 Noel Sloboda
Noel Sloboda’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Ghostlight,
Keyhole Magazine, Sein und Werden, 365 Tomorrows, Fissure, and Tales from the Moonlit Path.
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November 20th, 2009 at 12:18 am
Quite funny that reading over the internet would have solved his entire problem! Cruel twist at the end….