auxilio dusts the shelves
I recently finished shelving my little piece of heaven on earth—my library—which I write about here, and catalog here. And before you think I’m just hopelessly obsessed, at least I’m not this guy, who seems to have created a kind of library of the damned. Since shelving my last book, almost without thinking about it, I’ve been compiling lists of books that describe great libraries. I didn’t mean to—I’ve been reading South American writers lately; gritty yet shimmering stories by authors like Roberto Bolano and Cesar Aira. They are studies in the violence that accompanies creation, rebirth and revolution, and while none of these short, intense novels are what I’d call “easy†reading, their ferocity is a welcome change from the self-centered, introspective navel-gazing that seems to obsess so much American fiction these days. It was while I was reading Bolano’s crime novel The Amulet that I came across this passage:
Auxilio, leave those papers alone, woman, dust and literature have always gone together. And I would look at them and think, How right they are, dust and literature, from the beginning, and since at the time I was avid for detail, I conjured up wonderful and melancholy scenes, I imagined books sitting quietly on shelves and the dust of the world creeping into libraries, slowly, persistently, unstoppably, and then I came to understand that books are easy prey for dust (I understood this but refused to accept it), I saw whirlwinds, clouds of dust gathering over a plain somewhere deep in my memory, and the clouds advanced until they reached Mexico City, the clouds that had come from my own private plain, which belonged to everyone although many refused to admit it, and those clouds covered everything with dust, the books I had read and those I was planning to read, covered them irrevocably, there was nothing to be done: however heroic my efforts with broom and rag, the dust was never going to go away since it was an integral part of the books, their way of living or of mimicking something like life.
–Roberto Bolano, The Amulet
