My books, like my memories, keep moving

Every few months I move small mountains of books.

I move the leaning tower of Pisa of books on my bedside dresser to my upstairs study. I stack them neatly on my wide writing table. I move books from my home study to my church study.

I carry books by the armload. Academic books, commentaries, new story collections, nonfiction. I neatly fill cloth bags, from side to side and back to front, so tightly I can barely lift the bag. Packing books is a three-dimensional game of literary Tetris. A mason’s bag of bricks.

The books I’ve read (and those I’m saving to read later) are going to my professional library at the church. I leaf through the books I’ve read and skim the underlined passages. It’s like licking a dessert plate — just a taste of something sweet.

From Geoff Dyer’s book about jazz, “But Beautiful”, I find this passage about the great pianist Thelonious Monk, who, when it came time for others in the concert to solo, would famously get up and dance.

“He started quietly, tapping a foot, clicking his fingers, then he raised his knees and elbows, rotating, shaking his head, meandering everywhere with his arms outstretched.”

This puts a face on the Spirit brooding over creation.

I move dozens of half-filled notebooks around my rooms. Small Moleskines that fit into a back pocket. Large art journals with thick pages suitable for sketching and watercolor. These are filled with my scribbles, notes, story ideas, rants, grocery lists, sermon notes, and poems. With these notes I’m attempting to capture inspiration on the page like lightning bugs in a jar.

In one dog-eared journal are notes I wrote at a conference last year. I find lines about the difference between narrative thinking and lyrical thinking, the chronological versus the associative.

And this quote from a lecture by either Stuart Dybek or Alex Kotlowitz, both brilliant writers, “When you are writing, are you looking for swerves in reality?” And this: “The rhythm of speech can drive a story.” And this, from the late E.B. White: “Writers sit under storm clouds.”

In that same notebook, written when we were recently in Boston, are words that slay me. “I’ve known my wife longer than I knew my father.” I find this surreal, impossible. I want to rise like mist and dance like Thelonious, eyes closed, moving through and soaking in the moment, like lava in a lamp, a spirit dance.

That’s what all these pages of all these books and journals do. They soak up stories, ideas, moments. I carry these treasured tomes like launch codes handcuffed to my wrist in cloth bags to awaiting shelves. I’m a book mover on a mission.

In making room on the shelves in my office for the piles of books from my house, I select titles at church worthy of reading and stack them in my empty bag to take home.

I found two unopened copies of Philip Gerard’s gorgeous essays The Patron Saint of Dreams. Philip is a man I almost knew. We shared friends at Hub City Press.

Philip died in 2022. And yet I hold his book in my hand, fan its pages with my thumb, smell the paper, read his luminous essays about hurricanes, shipwreck, and his mother’s death, and I clearly hear his voice.

Is this being dead?

I’ve been shuttling Michel Quoist’s Prayers, published in 1954, from my bedside to my office to every writing table I’ve ever had for most of my adult life. Mine is a clean, new copy. Somewhere at my office, I have an underlined, prayed-through first edition.

I accidentally removed Ada Limón’s The Carrying from house to church, then returned it when I discovered my mistake. All poetry stays at home on the floor-to-ceiling shelf in the bedroom. Poetry (and visual art) is essential to both writing and dreams and needs to always be near my bed where I write and dream and sometimes sleep.

This spring I read and reread a stack of Katherine Paterson books. The Great Gilly Hopkins ends about as well as any story should. Too soon. The paperback pages of her old Christmas stories are brittle like flakes of mica. They shine silver and gold.

Katherine’s books, many of them inscribed, have been too-long scattered. Not anymore. These beloved books found space in my office shelved above Frederick Buechner, Kathleen Norris, and Anne Lamotte.

I hauled two Garrison Keillor essay collections to the office and hauled two more that I hadn’t cracked home to the bedside. Humor, like poetry, nicely seeds dreams, and his humor speaks to my Lake Wobegon heart.

All told, I shift about four heavy bags of books to various pieces of real estate at which I spend much of my life. Their spines line up like soldiers standing at attention on my shelves. Ever-present, they watch me like lifeguards ready to toss a line of inspiration should I start to sink staring at a blank page the size of an ocean.

I may move a book to an envelope and drop it in the mail to a friend.

I may pull another down because it speaks a word I need to hear again. How many times have I carted to and fro Heschel’s masterpiece The Prophets?

Many of these books will go the way of their predecessors, packed in liquor and banana boxes and donated to the library.

These books are always moving me.

And I am always moving them. History. Essays. Novels.

One small mountain at a time.