When disorder sparks joy

When my wife and I moved to Delhi from Washington, DC, in the summer of 2012, 21 of the 23 boxes we had shipped over comprised only books. Many of them had survived since I had left Kuwait as a 17-year-old in 1994 through stints in various countries and cities. A couple of months ago it looked as if those same books might not make it through another move, this time a few hundred metres down the road from our old flat to the new one we had just rented. My wife, reasonably, and not just because she had been watching Marie Kondo, argued for a stocktaking and, eventually, a winnowing down to only those books that sparked joy.

Except, as she acknowledged when she tried to select books from her own substantial portion of our collection to give away, it’s the books in their entirety, spilling from the shelves, piles stacked on top of, and in front of, piles, that spark joy. Do I like every book on our shelves? Of course not. Some, when I catch sight of them, cause me to recoil (The RSS by Walter Anderson and Shridhar Damle being one example). Some I have not read and am unlikely to ever read. Some evoke only confusion — why do we own so much Jonathan Franzen?

And then there’s organisation. The home librarian, like his institutional counterpart, seeks to impose order on chaos. But if institutions with vast collections require systems, surely our smaller home libraries, even if stretching to a few thousand volumes, benefit from idiosyncrasy. Do I want to know exactly where a certain book is and so eschew the opportunity to linger at my shelves, to forego serendipitous discovery? The thing is, I love distraction and procrastination, seek pathologically to postpone the inevitable — why should I let the toad work, as Philip Larkin put it, squat on my life?

The writer Hanya Yanagihara lives in a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment with 12,000 books that she orders alphabetically. She scorns people who order their books by colour as not caring what’s actually in the books. This to me seems unduly combative. Books are, after all, objects too, valued for their aesthetic and sensory affect; otherwise, we’d house all our books on electronic readers (I’m guilty of neglecting many brilliant books because they’re stored on my laptop and not my shelf). And Yanagihara’s own method, though obviously sensible, strikes me as too dreary, the painstaking pedantry of storing your Coetzee after your Coe and your Coelho (though why would you own any Coelho?). I prefer the idea of concordia discors, of a kind of natural harmony emerging from the discordant jumble of my books. “For what else is this collection,” as Walter Benjamin notes in “Unpacking My Library”, “but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?”

 

My books, in that sense, reflect the disorder and confusion of my thoughts. I look, for instance, at a column of books — stretching now up to the ceiling and half-hidden by a potted plant and a photo of my baby son — that remind me of my abandonment of graduate school and any pretension to scholarship: copies of German and Italian dictionaries, a Wheelock’s Latin, volumes of theory, of Kristeva, Cioran, Deleuze. Here too are my Nortons and black-spined Penguin Classics, reminders of the revelations of undergraduate reading, of cracking open Sterne, Defoe or Swift with a weary sigh only to look up hours later, the day gone, your synapses thrumming, shocked into fever.

As I age, fiction and poetry continue to thrill, to befuddle pleasingly. It’s the smug certainties of nonfiction that now irritate me, all that exhausting knowing, the delusion that “facts” lead to understanding. These books of history and politics seem to me to share the same impulse towards conclusion that puts me off the detective fiction I loved as a boy. It seeks, like all those home librarians sifting, sifting, sifting through their collections, to wrangle order from chaos. I once read an interview with the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard in which he mentioned his “Protestantic inner voice that says reading is lazy”. I am lazy. Lazy and cowardly, softened by the privilege of owning books, able, through the privilege of owning books, to escape the world as I did when I was a boy and books were as much something to read as something to hold in front of your face.

All of this, I guess, is to say, leave your bookshelves in disarray. Being open to confusion, to not quite knowing where to find what you’re looking for, seems to me these days infinitely preferable to the alternative — the bullish certainty and self-confidence required to impose your idea of order.