libraries as cathedrals of secrets
reading a good book confers the sensation that one is being let in on a particularly succulent secret. the pages whisper into your ear; each sentence brings dawning recognition, or some heretofore concealed truth. it is all so glorious that one closes the book with a catholic sorrow, yet gleefully riddled with the privilege of divulgence.
it is this divulgence, I realize, that causes the sense of joyous solidarity when encountering someone who has read the same book - "so you know the secret too!" - and why, on occasion, the discovery that they disliked that same book (and its privileged secrets) is so poisonous. it's this divulgence that makes us clasp a book to our breast, or stroke its cover in reverence - that it deemed you worthy to share its secret with. it's the same brand of glee in childhood, when your best friend leans across to your table and whispers something about the teacher's prodigious nasal cavities, and henceforth, every knowing look shared brings an academy of jubilance: a vicarious, implicatured understanding. (and the wellspring of giggles).
and so when I run my eyes along the length of my bulging bookshelf, exchanging glances with the book spines, each book triggers the memory of divulgence: "I remember what you told me that day," I say to Pinker, or Larkin, or Jenkins, or Walcott, or Porter, or Wilde, or Voltaire, or Rorty - "and I remember what you told me last night," I say fondly to Heidegger's Essence & Truth, "about truth and the unhiddenness of beings," and it stares placidly back at me, still half-full of hidden secrets, not a jot of guilt in its candid gaze for keeping me awake until 4am last night. Heidegger, dear readers, is not for bedtime reading.