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Pacific Ponderings

A Lament for Lost Libraries

“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest . . . extraction of that living intellect that bred them. . . . as good almost kill a man as kill a good book.” (John Milton, Areopagitica)

I write today in lament for lost libraries, especially mine.

It is common for book lovers and scholars to lament the loss of ancient libraries, like the Great Library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt (partially burned by Julius Caesar), or the House of Wisdom in Baghdad (destroyed by the Mongols), or the magnificent library of Nalanda in India (destroyed by Muslim Turks to suppress Buddhism in its birthplace), or the Byzantine Imperial Library of Constantinople (sacked by the Crusaders), or the Mayan codices in the Yucatán (burned by the Spanish Conquistadors).

I mourn the loss of these libraries and others. Wikipedia contains a depressingly long list of lost libraries. (See “List of destroyed libraries.”) Much of the material in them was unique. So we don’t even know what was lost. Were there echoes of the Book of Mormon, for example, in the incinerated Mayan codices? We will never know. Truly “as good almost kill a man as kill a good book.”

But today I especially mourn the loss of my personal library, or at least a cherished part of it. When I moved to Hawaii, I gave away many books to colleagues and students, in the melancholy realization that this assignment likely marked the end of my career as a literature professor.

But I intended to keep a basic library. I discovered some weeks after we arrived in Laie that many of my favorite books were missing. I have been searching for and lamenting them ever since.

For years I thought that maybe they were in a box that had been misplaced, either here or in Utah. So I haunted my closets and kept checking my cupboards. But despite looking repeatedly in every nook and cranny, I never found them. They are gone, evidently lost forever. And with them is lost marginalia recording years of conversations with these old friends.

The missing boxes contained literature, philosophy, and history from the medieval period through the nineteenth century. I still have some books from this period, but not many. I constantly complain to Susan when I discover I am missing another book that I thought I had kept.

Thus, when I recently wrote about a passage from Dante’s Divine Comedy, I searched in vain for a copy. I used to own several translations. Now I own none.

When I had a friend to supper the other day, I told him about something Thomas More said at the end of the first book of Utopia about speaking the truth to kings. I went to my bookshelf to get it, only to discover that I didn’t have a single copy of Utopia in my collection. Again, I used to own several.

I no longer have even some of my favorite religious writers, books I would never have wittingly parted with, like The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, the sweetest book of medieval spirituality, and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s extraordinary collected poetry and prose.

I mourn the loss of these books as I would the loss of a good friend. As Milton says, books are like vials containing “the living intellect that bred them.”

Yes, I can buy new copies, but these won’t have my marginalia. And it is expensive to replace what I spent a lifetime collecting.

And yes, I can read books online. Thank goodness for the internet! But I like the heft of a book in my hands and the convenience of browsing.

More importantly, to find some things you need to know beforehand what you are looking for. The other day, for example, I wanted to share some Yeats poems with Susan. I could only find them because I remembered the titles: “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “A Prayer for My Daughter.” But I couldn’t remember the name of some poems by Leslie Norris. So I had to browse his collected poetry on my bookshelf. The internet provides little opportunity to browse and re-discover things that have engaged us in the past.

As much as I miss my lost library, however, I don’t want to end this essay on an elegiac note. Today is a day to celebrate books. It is, after all, Dr. Seuss’s Birthday, commemorated as “National Read Across America Day.” Children all across America are engaged in readathons today. And many, thankfully, will read their own copies of Dr. Seuss and other favorite books.

On Saturday, I met with a donor who presented me with an expensively bound complete set of Robert Louis Stevenson’s works for our own Joseph F. Smith Library. I was happy to be able to add this to our Pacific collection.

What is more, he also presented me with a less expensive complete set of Stevenson for my personal library. As I browsed the collection, I found a poetic prayer by Stevenson, which I first read and came to love a few years ago. I read it to the donor. He was delighted. So was I. It seemed to bring Stevenson into the room, for “books are not absolutely dead things.” I am grateful to add these new vials of living intellect to my library.