NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
October 26, 2005
Old books
I write this column under extraordinary deadline pressure. If I don't get it in on time, I will not be able to make the clean-up round at the Trinity College book sale, here in Toronto. Only the reader who has lived his life surrounded by decaying, second-hand books, will appreciate the urgency.The annual Ottawa Book Fair has come and passed once again; I think it is the best in Canada. But it is where the surviving "antiquarian" booksellers take their best stock, and offer it at necessarily high prices. They have to recoup the cost of their travelling and stalls. My heart goes out to them, but my wallet tends to be retained. In all Canada, the best bargains are obtainable at the college sales of the University of Toronto, which have become, for those who read, the best opportunity to stock up. Trinity celebrated the 30th anniversary of its sale this year -- this grand old Anglican seminary (now mostly converted to other uses) was the pioneer. Victoria College now opens the season, then University, Trinity, and finally St Michael's -- the new Catholic kid on the block. Technically, Woodsworth College has the earliest sale, but the less we say about that, the better. The institution of these book sales -- imported from England like so much of what is still worth having in this country -- is flourishing, although the quality of the books on offer is in decline. This is because the chief source of donations seems to be retired and deceased university professors. And the quality of those has been dropping steadily for the last generation. You may see that in the sort of books they leave. Nevertheless, when used books are laid out on tables by their tens of thousands, there is always something to find. And in the end, the question is not of price. It is of finding the book at all, that "poem like a missal found / In the mud, a missal for that young man, / That scholar hungriest for that book." (Wallace Stevens.) I'm sure they had sales like this in ancient Alexandria. The great Library in that city would have been receiving constant donations of books (well, scrolls and the odd early codex). The librarians would have sneered at many of these well-intentioned gifts, marking others as worthy but redundant. It is inconceivable that they didn't try to raise a little cash, by flogging these rejects on the side. We know they did a lively trade in manuscript copying. A civilization requires the lively circulation of old books. It is all very well to put their contents on the Internet -- you need the physical object to curl up with, and as a proof that the past really happened. You need the element of chance and discovery, in rooting through the remains of previous generations. Only a library or a used book store or sale can provide this, in the round -- for each contains, in addition to what is currently thought worth reading, a selection of what was once thought so. A computer screen is too small a window, and must be searched along a linear path, which no matter how it zigs and zags, remains a single line of inquiry. Moreover, to my mind, a book is to a PDF file as sex to pornography. The book is something to hold, not just something to look at. I cannot see an excerpt from an attractive book on some backlit computer projection, without longing for the real thing. There is a political significance in this, too. The decline of books, and their replacement with databases, advances the cause of the Left. It is not good for those of us who are, in our hearts, old tories. Conservatism is all about building from a base, on true foundations -- it means building a library full of quaint things. Liberalism, at least in its contemporary form (which I call, "gliberalism") is instead about starting over from scratch. It is indifferent to the consequences of its actions. Now, toryism is a little different from conservatism. There is a revolutionary element in toryism. It is an active thing, it has a prophetic quality, it involves occasionally tearing down what has been badly built, and trying to rebuild it correctly. Your genuine tory can sometimes be deeply disturbing to your genuine conservative. But unlike the gliberal, the tory is obsessed with the result of his enterprise. The gliberal, caring nothing for the past, is likewise careless of the future. I've come to appreciate this, over the decades, by the number of times I have had to decamp, and in my flight have had to disperse the bulk of a library. It would anyway be dispersed at my death, but while I breathe, I must do what I can to restore the physical props of a life that will not disown the past. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top