Dear bibliopathologist,
I have a problem: I struggle to put the books back on the shelves once I have finished them. In fact, I just can’t and they hang around the house for weeks, months, years. I suspect that a not insignificant part of the problem is of a spiritual nature: the mere idea of putting a book that I liked on the shelf immediately arises regret. It is like standing there to see the body of a loved one descend into the depths of the earth with whom we would have liked to do many more beautiful things together. How can we learn to live peacefully with the unpleasant feeling that in the midst of all the beautiful things we have happened to read, something important may also have escaped us that we have not been able to grasp?
–BC
Caro BC,
we enter, at night, a cabinet of wax figures. Or in the clothing department of a department store, after closing time, among all those mannequins. How do you say? You are scared? And I believe you are afraid: it is no coincidence that in places of this genre they have set a lot of fantastic stories and horror films. But what is it that disturbs us in a wax museum? The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset gave an answer that I find very penetrating: those mannequins disturb us because there is no way to reduce them to mere objects. “When we perceive them as living beings, they scoff at us by revealing their corpse secret of mannequins; but if we see them as fictions, they seem to palpitate with irritation ”. Alive, they look dead; when they are dead, they seem alive. And between these two poles the pendulum of our psyche swings constantly, without finding rest.
Now let’s go into a library – always at night, please. We observe the books lined up on the shelves. Well, are they animate or inanimate? It is not that easy to say. When we weigh them in our hands they are undoubtedly material objects, docile and inert. They are interchangeable with other objects of the same shape and thickness: as a wedge for a wobbly table, there is no difference between The white nights by Dostoevsky, a folded piece of cardboard and a scrap from carpentry. But would we say the same while we are immersed in reading? In those hours, the book is a magically animated being, more animated than the bloodless world that extends beyond the precipitous margins of the page. But the time for the end arrives. The book has to return to the state of a thing, some kind of clutter on a shelf. But the second time is not like the first. When we pulled him off the bookcase we brought him to life; now we must accompany him to death.
Your feelings – regret, reluctance to say goodbye, even a meandering sense of reproach for not doing all you could with the deceased – are a distillation of the psychology of grief. On closer inspection, an anthropological constant of humanity is the ambivalence of the survivors towards the corpse not yet buried. In those days of interregnum, in the presence of a body perceived as no longer animated but as not yet inanimate, the most intolerable anxieties take shape, and funeral rites serve to dominate them. Among the peoples of hunters and gatherers, for example, the corpse is hastily reduced to a “thing”, and a dangerous and contagious thing to get rid of. In agricultural civilizations, on the contrary, the dead are transformed into an ancestor, therefore into a presence with protective virtues perpetually hovering over the city of the living.
Homework: get a good book by Alfonso di Nola, Death triumphed. Anthropology of mourning, and read the chapter Behavior around the corpse taking care to mentally replace “corpse” with “book”, “death” with “end of reading” and “burial” with “return to the library”. You will see that much, if not all, comes back. And perhaps, imagining your bookcase as a home altar of Lares and Penates of paper, the farewell to a book that has just finished will be less agonizing.
.