Inscriptions
It’s not often that I find myself in thrift shops. If I do, it is usually to donate rather than purchase. These days, it seems that my home is as full as my heart. I live in an on-going cycle of assessment, collection and purge. It’s as if objects whirl in circles on my patio and blow in on the wind. No matter how vigilant I am, I can’t seem to keep them from entering.
It is because of this circumstance that I came to read Marie Kondo’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2014). The book had been sitting on my shelf for a few years, taking up as little space as it wanted to and waiting for me to open it. During the upheaval of the pandemic, I reached for it, dusted it off and made a commitment. The instability of time left me restless, and I needed a plan to follow and someone to tell me what to do. Marie Kondo’s series of steps guided me through the process of painstakingly reviewing, sorting and reducing my possessions. I don’t regret the process, and there are few things I have missed. The only void has been left by my books.
I remember books and their contents. It’s not hard for me to recollect what happens on page forty-three or to recall a passage describing a certain moment or place. When I close my eyes, I know where things are, and most things can usually be found in books. There are some items which bring comfort to certain people. Books are comfortable for me.
So, sometimes I find myself in thrift shops. They are, for me, like museums of lives turned upside down or hearts cracked open. They are filled with racks and shelves of discarded moments and memories and house objects that have meaning for people I have never met. They emit an energy of emotions the clarity of which is reserved only for those who felt them.
And there are books. If I do find myself in a thrift shop, I head straight for the bookshelves. It is possible (no?) that I might find one of my own books there, waiting for me. Or I could stumble on a gem that may form part of my re-imagined book collection. Perhaps I will find something new.
It follows that a few weeks ago, I was standing in front of a bookshelf at a local thrift shop, and I came upon a copy of A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth (1993). This is a book I have wanted to read for a very long time, but, overwhelmed by its 1474 pages (!!), I have always returned it to the shelf with a sigh. When I held this book in my hand, it was heavy with the weight of carefully woven stories, of transitions, traumas and turbulent times. So, this time, the book has made it onto my shelf, not because it is a story of India, but because of an inscription on the flyleaf:
Dear Gabriele –
I enjoyed this
roman-fleuve and
hope you will too –
Nga
Dec 2000
This took me back to years ago when I was travelling through Vietnam and ran out of reading material. The clerk at my hotel recommended a book fair several streets away in a mysterious back alley. Tables upon tables stacked with books of all sorts and sizes ran the length of the space. As I was primarily interested in books written by Vietnamese authors, the bookseller suggested Novel without a Name by Duong Thu Huong (1996), a disturbing tale about the Vietnamese war from a local perspective. He wrapped the cover of the book tightly in paper and warned me not to read it in public. I smiled and promised.
In this alley I also found the pirated copy of The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D. (1998) that still sits on my bookshelf today. It is not an original copy; it is photocopied, covered in clear packing tape and carefully bound with string. Travelling on my own, as I was, through Vietnam, the book title was inspiration enough, but it was the inscription in the flyleaf, once again, that moved me to purchase it:
Natalie
Love Luck & Laughter
Gabrielle
Two Gabrieles (one with one ‘l’ and one with two): one who gave a book and another who received it.
Who is this Gabrielle whose copy of The Art of Happiness made it to Vietnam and became the source of so many other copies? Did she find love, luck and laughter? And what of Natalie? What moved her to give this book to Gabrielle? Who is Nga? And why would she choose the literary (and somewhat romantic) term roman-fleuve to describe A Suitable Boy?
These inscriptions breathe life into the books that house them. Suddenly, I am not just a reader but a participant in the conversations of Gabriele and Nga or Natalie and Gabrielle. Who they are to each other I have no way of knowing, yet the intimacy of the inscriptions and the implication of the movement of these books from one set of hands to another is somehow evidence of their relationships. Inscriptions like these instill a deep understanding in me: they are a reassurance that we are all connected. Our lives are carefully woven into a series of webs that are not separate from each other. Incidentally, this is one of the central themes of The Art of Happiness: that fostering compassion for others brings us closer to understanding the interconnectedness of all things.
It is not possible for us to know where the pieces of our hearts may land. Whether we leave them in the flyleaves of books as gifts for friends or scatter them loose around the world only to be found later by strangers, they are bound to come to the right person in just the right moment.
Standing there, in the thrift shop, with A Suitable Boy heavy in my hands, it was as if Nga’s wish for Gabriele to enjoy the novel, or Gabrielle’s wish for Natalie to experience love, luck and laughter were, in some way, extended to me. This made me smile, and when I finally do sit down to read the novel, it will be with the certainty that all the pieces of my heart, even those I have left scattered around the world, will find their way home.
Thank you for being here.
Recommended Books
Cutler, Howard C. and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. Hodder, 1998.
Kondo, Marie. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. Ten Speed Press, 2014.
Seth, Vikram. A Suitable Boy. McArthur & Company, 1993.