Forever Booked

The old family home where we spent many a family holiday together has at last been sold. Soon, we will sell the bulk of our parents' amazing library, long stored in that 1920s four-square edifice, some 2000 volumes collected over more than 50 years. We would be selling more, but my brother, sister and I have all picked out favorites that we don't want to part with.

Our choices, like our parents', are far-ranging: from literary criticism to poetry, from abstract expressionism to American folk art, from Texas barbecue to French Mediterranean dishes, from children's illustrated Bibles to Bonhoeffer and Borg. We have also saved treasures to pass on to my son's generation: our great-grandfather's copy of Leaves of Grass; books signed by Updike, Ciardi, and Rollo May, personally addressed to our forebears; and one of my mother's prized possessions from childhood: The Wonder World series of leather-bound, story-filled volumes.

Going through books is a good exercise for the mind and the hand. You think as you touch, you remember as you thumb through pages--some yellow with age, some marked by people you loved, their scribbled insights and comments now as important as the books themselves.

There is a great need and a fitting place for E-books in all forms. The Kindle and its mechanical brethren make great traveling companions, both at home and abroad. But, I don't believe that the digital will ever completely replace the physical.

Those of us who love and value books treasure them for many reasons. No need to list them here. But, I do feel a need to remind that we are physical creatures, as are books. We feel them as we read them, and somehow, those printed "leaves" that come from trees feel us as we touch them, turn them, gaze upon or read through them.

It comes as no surprise that I've already pulled some books from the sale piles that will now come back home with me. To think, to know that I can hold in my hand any combination of knowledge and wisdom, of image or puzzle, of tradition or iconoclasm; that my hands can hold what my ancestors held and that I can participate in the thread of their learning and reading makes me feel as though I am decorating the family tree with light-filled prisms.

I'm hooked. I'm booked. The right books do much more for me than "enkindle" my imagination. They do for me what William Butler Yeats said education should do for us all: not fill a pail, but light a fire.

Text, copyright Ysabel de la Rosa, 2010, All rights reserved.