THE LAST WORD.

If you love a book, Abuse it

A rare, serious housecleaning effort recently required that I move through the house, taking all the books off the shelves where many of them have stood moldering for years, encouraging me to think about each one. I found loving inscriptions from persons gone and not forgotten. Historical documents: letters and cards used as bookmarks. End papers written on, margins covered with comments and arguments. Ostensibly all of these were my books, but in an important way only those I had written in really belonged to me.

This in spite of repeated admonitions, "Never write in a book, nor dog-ear a page, nor set a book face-down on its open pages." You must not deface a book. What a word! Deface: To mar; spoil the appearance of; disfigure. Not really. To write in a book can be an act of love or at very least, an effort to understand it.

In Ex Libris, Anne Fadiman notes that there are two ways to love a book. Reading as a reverential act, a fond feeling that holds its object in highest esteem, but at a Platonic distance. The other way Fadiman calls "carnal," because it is deep, intimate, personal, sometimes turning into a wrestling match between reader and author.

Mortimer Adler, in How to Read a Book, says that a book is not really yours until you have responded to it with questioning, argument, contradiction; or assent and applause. Adler believed that if writing in books offends the rule you learned in third grade, you should buy a copy to keep as a piece of furniture and another copy to read.

The books I have really read are interlined and margin-filled with comments. The end papers and the insides of the covers are covered with quotations that I didn't want to lose.

I pick up a falling-apart paperback of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, a book about loss. I first read it at a time when I was overwhelmed by a loss that seemed insurmountable, blotting out any possibility that I might ever move on from it. A grieving woman in Housekeeping knows that moving on requires that she must "perform the rituals of the ordinary as an act of faith." And reminds herself that "what has perished need not be lost, for when do we know anything more utterly than when we have lost it?" Having written these lines inside the cover almost twenty years ago, I remember them. Nor can I forget the grandmother's imagining heaven as "a reunion at the other side of a lake, all those you had ever lost gathered there to meet you."

This copy of Middlemarch has seen hard use. I read it one long winter when all of our children were very young and I was helping to write a doctoral thesis not my own. Did I identify with the hapless Dorothea who, "while she longed to do work of her own which would be directly beneficent, like the sunshine and the rain," confined herself to a more noble goal: "to help someone who did great works, so that his burden would be lighter"?

Howard's End is all about connections and the difficulty and necessity of establishing them, but here inside the back cover is an ambitious recipe for dying. "One ought to die neither as a victim nor as a fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering and the shore that he must leave."

Another book I have clearly wanted to hold onto is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. My own comments fight for some open space even at the ends of chapters. Impossible to choose just one, except, perhaps, these rueful lines, cherished in my old age: "The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and thanks to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia, we manage to endure the burden of the past."

Pushed into a far corner of a bottom shelf is a five-volume set of Dickens. Someone has observed that you should read Dickens when you are very young. No subtleties of characterization here; everybody wearing a placard around his neck. "Good guy." "Bad guy." "Fair-haired child." "Mean old man." In Hard Times the first page lines up the principals and defines each one unequivocally. "Mrs. Blackpool: a dissolute, drunken woman." "Stephen Blackpool: an honest, hard- working power-loom weaver." "Thomas Gradgrind: a selfish, ill-natured whelp."

Years later a character turns up as a friend or an enemy. When I was ten, the Chicago Daily News offered five volumes of Dickens free to anyone who bought a subscription. My father gave this precious premium to me. That whole hot summer I measured my own life and hard times against those of David Copperfield. Mr. Micawber, Little Nell, Mr. McChoakumchild, Aunt Betsy Trotwood, Miss Havisham: I can see them still because of Dickens's skillful depictions and because these were my books and I could write in them if I wanted to. Here they are now, shabby and yellowed, my pale-penciled notations barely readable. (It says here inside the cover of David Copperfield: "Uriah Heep and his mother are discusting creeps and hipacrits!") My first excursion into literary criticism.-Katharine Byrne writes from Chicago.