A man’s relationship with his books tells you a lot about him

My entries dwindling to nary one a month, one might have the idea that I’ve quit the project. Not true. After Sacred Hunger I read three books, two of which I quite enjoyed. The three were Robert Stone’s Bay of Souls, Jordan Fisher Smith’s Nature Noir and E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed. I could have done without Stone’s novel that really went over the top, but Smith’s park ranger memoir was great. I marveled at his descriptions of foliage. I’ve often wished I could name flora at will and that I was better versed in Roman history and Greek mythology.

Sledge’s book was by far the best thing I’ve read this year. I’ll go over it in detail in my next entry. I don’t have it right now having lent it to my father Carlton Einar Gustafson, who fought on Okinawa at the same time as Sledge. The difference being my dad was army and Sledgehammer a marine. I hesitated giving it to my dad. He’s told me a lot about his time in the army, about joining a unit and having his foxhole mates shot the first night out. He has two Purple Hearts and Bronze Star. He’s never revealed what he got the Star for. Sledge’s account pulls no punches and I wondered if my dad wanted to revisit the horror of something he experienced over sixty years ago. But he seemed keen on reading it.

Since I finished it in August I haven’t read a book all the way through. It would be safe to say I’ve fallen in and out of depression. I’ve had trouble writing, in finishing things. I’ve still been reading, mostly journalism. I think I’m going to read Netherland next which isn’t on my list, but was a birthday present this year. Recently, I’ve gone back to reading Clive James’ Cutural Amnesia. It’s been sitting on my bedside table for over a year now and I find it incredibly inspiring since, in essence, it’s about is reading. It is a book of essays on poets and writers and rulers and entertainers. But what I really like is how an essay on Montesquieu say can spiral off into a story of how Stalin refused to believe Hitler would double-cross him and how he fainted when he could no longer refute the fact that Barbarossa was under way.

In addition, at the heart of the book is something that I often brood over, the pursuit of knowledge and the way in which knowledge and talent are drained by death. Where do memories go when the vessel that carries them ceases to be? And perhaps, more importantly, is there a responsibility in reading. Is it increasingly a revolutionary act. I just read James entry on Goebbels. It’s fascinating in that he discusses the role of Wilfred von Oven, Goebbels uniformed amanuensis and how von Oven escaped to Argentina and ended up publishing Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende, a two-volume historical document of Goebbels’ insanity. James mentions how he ends up tracking down his own set fifty years on in Buenos Aires and sits down in his favorite café in San Telmo to read it.

Later, James has an incredible passage in which he notes how Goebbels threw out all the party propaganda toward the end of the war and reorganized his library (with the help of von Oven) purely according to literary standards. In the end, it’s as if Goebbels subconsciously rued the path he had taken as a man of action and not a man of learning:

“Perhaps now, with the roof falling in, he hankered for the lost past, at a level he could not examine. But the reordering of his books did the examining for him. A man’s relationship with his books tells you a lot about him, and in the case of a man like Goebbels we should pay close attention, because a crucial early choice he made was one that continually faces any of us who read at all. He chose a life of action, and his life would have been different if he had not. It could have been said that the lives of millions of innocent people would have been different too, but there we should be equally alert to the danger of optimism. The only thing different might have been that he would have had a job like von Oven’s. He might have been merely reporting on the insanity instead of helping to create it, but the insanity would have still been there. Hitler wouldn’t have needed to find someone else. Someone else would have found him. When absolute power is on offer, talent fights to get in.”

Thank you, Mr. James for this inspiration. For it is in this time, that reading is required. Not to be saved from oneself as Goebbels failed to do, but to be saved from others who denigrate learning, books, words. Just look at the McCain campaign’s assault on words (a nod to James Wood’s New Yorker piece) that somehow masks their own willingness to say anything. It could be argued that we need words, rational thought, logical arguments more than ever. Death may indeed drain us of our knowledge, but the ability to convey thoughts, to express what it is to be alive now remains invaluable to any idea of a future.