humans & books - or the pathos of perishable things

 

Excitement & Pathos

Any regular visitor of second hand books is familiar with that particular mix of excitement and pathos. The excitement of stumbling upon a book which matches one’s interests and affinities  -  a book of whose existence one may or may not have been aware.  Such finds can seem like heaven-sent gifts,  in their serendipity so unlike the outcome of an efficient search process on the web. But there is also the pathos, associated with the journey of the book and of its previous owner(s). 

Take for instance that freshly arrived batch of art books in the “Pêle Mêle” 2^nd hand bookshop in Waterloo : each book I took off the shelf was miraculously appealing to a particular recent affinity of mine  (there was Paul Veyne’s “Mon Musée Imaginaire”, there were the high quality art books on Tiepolo – one of them still including scraps of a magazine article referring to Alpers’ & Baxandall’s 1996 ravishing study “Tiepolo et l’intelligence picturale”). 

Who was this previous owner – with his or her exquisite collection of art books? Why did the books arrive here? Did he or she die recently – was he or she a representative of perhaps the last generation for whom art history was part and parcel of their self-education, their “bildung” as a person? 

Or take that other book, found a few years ago in the “Pêle Mêle” at Ixelles, “Les Grands Pianistes du XXe siècle”, with that poignant anniversary inscription of a woman to her husband (“à mon mari qui est tellement jeune à 63 ans que j’eu oublié notre âge” dated November 2014 … So what happened, one anxiously wonders, what explains that this lovingly given book (bought in Paris, so suggests the  bookmark from a Paris fine arts bookshop) so soon already ended up in a Brussels second hand book shop ?

"The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living"

This mix of feelings, the “pattern of dead and living” (TS Eliot) gets more complicated and more emotional still when one is browsing old objects and books in one’s own parents’ house (and former childhood home).

The house, so empty and meaningless now without its lifelong  occupants, is on this particular day yet full of voices. The hushed and conscientious voices of the direct descendants  taking in charge with some stress the sorting out of the estate, the brisk voices of  the grandchildren lovingly remembering (not without a touch of melancholy) their childhood visits and stay-overs, the excited cries of the very young great-grand children running through  the rooms.  

There are not that many books, actually, mostly technical and computer books, and lots of dated technical and IT equipment, testifying both to my father’s life-long passion for IT and to the very short life of technical and IT equipment (yesterday innovative state of the art ; discarded and incompatible today). In vain I look for the classical music LP’s I know my mother used to listen to with great abandon, or the old travel guides and educational language books she used to prepare the annual family trip. 

But in a room on the first floor, I’m intrigued by an old wooden cupboard, with book covers shimmering through a cloudy glass pane. A collection of old art books, evidently belonging to my mother’s father  (who apart from a railway engineering job, was interested in art, engravings & etchings mostly). The books look like having been untouched for decades. Most book spines show no sign of any use at all.  Books from the 50s and 60s; mostly Belgian art but also a few  reference works on undisputed old masters.

"The melancholy of things themselves" 

There’s one book, though, which betrays intense handling. It’s the catalogue of the Albert Baertsoen (1866-1922) Ghent retrospective of 1972. My grandfather has carefully inscribed with a fountain pen his name on the frontispiece , with the date “November 1972”.  In his meticulous hand writing he has also carefully added titles to a list of reproductions.  

And with a fine pencil line he has marked some of the accompanying texts.  “Baertsoen schildert den weemoed van de dingen zelf” 

He couldn’t have known that 50 years later there would be another Retrospective of Albert Baertsoen, one which was to make such an impression on his grand-child.

Baertsoen is often considered  as an artist of a vanishing world, with a style that would soon be outmoded and replaced by the successive avant- gardes of the 20th Century. And yet, the way he captures an atmosphere, the way he renders the reality and pathos of cityscapes, harbours and industries, appealed to a conscientious railway engineer in 1972, just as it still moves a melancholy economist now.  

Cherishing the poignant hazards of old books

Humans and their aspirations & feelings, Books, Paintings, Styles of art, .... - they all come and go. We’re extremely perishable, and one day, as the 2^nd hand book shop owner dryly remarked upon refusing to buy a no longer wanted book, “on finit tous au container”.

And yet -  some traces of it all may continue their perilous way throughout the ages.

The leading conservator of the Ghent old books library explained how their venerable old books were now all being sent to Google for digitalization.  I’m all for ensuring they can live on the worldwide web. Just as I’m all for the pathetic posting & tweeting by the billions of humans alive. Perhaps some sympathetic bot will read it all one day, spitting it out again, transformed,  at a curious prompt of a human living, say, 500 years on.

Meanwhile, I cherish the poignant hazards of finding old books.