Democratic Conversation

I have stacks of books in my home, books in every room: stacked vertically on shelves in my library, their spines peer out like a bouquet of various eyes; I have stove-pipe stacks of books on my dining room table; book stacks like pillars of an ancient temple surround my laptop; spread like a dropped deck of cards atop a multi-colored ottoman; stacked pyramid style on a round marble tabletop; stacked on the night table beside my bed; and stacked on the floor in a haphazard, avalanche flush at the foot of the overflowing night table.

Yes, all those stories, all that information. Colors for every occasion.

When words—and those images, stories, people, and ideas one creates from their use—are so much a part of your life, you tend to have a lot of them around. In culinary terms, I’m a gourmand: I enjoy every book, just as long as it is well prepared and beautifully presented.

Lest you think I’m promoting reading as a way of life, or path through life, let me quickly divest you of that notion. Books, actually, can make you stupid. I discovered early in life that knowledge, the dumb cousin of wisdom, cannot come from reading. The time I spend hunched over white pages punctuated with stylized black dots is solely for my own inspiration.

Putting all those words and images and information in your head is useless unless you get out of the house, into the wide world, press your mind against the minds of others, and use all that can come from books to some noble—even on occasion, artistic—means. We need more of both today. Not especially today, but today and the future.

Where did I get these notions? From much pondering and . . . well . . . from some books. At least, from what I gained by understanding what those books showed of human nature. Miguel Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”, the first volume of which was published Jan. 16, 1605, may be the best-realized story ever written. It was the first novel. And perhaps it should have been the last, too. For “Don Quixote” is the story of the narrowed life-view one achieves from spending too much time reading books.

The well-read person intuitively knows this.

(I currently have four books on the run: Maxwell Perkins’ selected letters, “Editor to Author”; Phlip Roth’s “The Human Stain”; John Worthen’s “D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider”; and Sam Harris’s “The End of Faith”)