Books Do Furnish a Mind

The pop-philosopher Julian Baggini in the Financial Times asks, Why is it so hard to get rid of our books? This might appear a trivial concern in the face of a pandemic and global warming, but the wry discourse of bourgeois unease as commodities climb up our walls reflects on both. Books have long been seen as dangerous, infectious even - a medium that allows ideas to travel not just in space but in time. They are also a very visible example of the stuff that we accumulate, the clutter of a lifetime's "relentless acquisition", as Baggini puts it. Of course we don't actually find it that hard to get rid of some of our books. If we did, you'd never see any at jumble sales or on eBay. But Baggini isn't talking about dog-eared Danielle Steele paperbacks. He is addressing his library, which is of a different class to your haphazard collection of SciFi and football memoirs. Implicit in the question is the suggestion that, in a world of e-books and the epistemic prosthesis of search engines, physical books are no longer neccesary for either entertainment or education, but also implicit is the idea that the book is losing its stature as a work of art in the age of digital reproduction. So perhaps a way of answering the question is to ask another: what do books represent today?

Baggini runs through the usual utilitarian and aesthetic arguments for and against keeping books but his central concern is not with their intrinsic value but the pyschological impact of having to "live under the weight of so many of them". That notion of weight suggests a near-unbearable pressure, but the reality seems to be more about lazy conformity than the crushing of a fragile ego: "The suspicion has to be that for many people, the main reason to keep a house full of books is to show ourselves and others that we are intelligent and well-read. Nothing else can signal this so effectively, or socially acceptably". This is a reductive view of cultural capital that dispenses with the wider social framework (habitus, disposition etc) outlined by Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction. While taste may be socially-determined, it doesn't follow that the "main reason" people acquire books is to show off. To think this is to fall back on an antique caricature of society and culture, such as when the nouveau riches of the nineteenth century would supposedly buy leather-bound volumes by the yard. I suspect the main reason people buy books is to read them.

That books are signalling devices is trivially true, but to imagine the only signal is intelligence is naive. Cultural goods chiefly represent class and status (this was Bourdieu's point), which is why the collected witterings of Prince Charles have a different cachet to the ghostwritten pap of the celebrity book market. The traditional reason for buying books "by the yard" (actually, buying complete libraries) was to display wealth, both in the volumes themselves and in the space (and expensive shelving) needed to display them. As the arrival of cheap paperbacks and the gradual spread of literacy in the nineteenth century democratised reading, class was increasingly performed by a preference for more expensive hardbacks and eventually the weighty coffee table book. Much of the twentieth century criticism of mass media centred on the assumption that the proles would reject literature for the shallow pleasures of radio, cinema and TV - or pornography, according to Orwell in 1984. In the event, people kept on buying and reading books.

In support of the idea that it's all for show, Baggini take aim at a particular modern habit: "Consider also those who have rows and rows of old travel guides. These books quickly go out of date so are not being kept because they will be used again". It simply isn't true to say that travel guides go out of date quickly. They deliberately avoid recommending hotels or restaurants that haven't been well-established, or look like they might not last, so you can rely on a 10-year old guide being at least 90% accurate, while monuments and museums hardly change over decades. Ironically, travel guides often become more valuable over the long haul as when change does happen they offer a means of time travel, not simply the revisiting of our own memories - no one will have experienced every site or establishment mentioned on every page - but the recreation of a historic environment that can be mentally traversed like an open simulation online. The humble travel guide is more than a souvenir, like the sticker on an old steamer trunk or the sewn patch on a rucksack, and people hang on to them for utilitarian as well as sentimental reasons.

Baggini returns to the theme of identity: "We use books to underline our identities when more often than not they undermine them. Most old books are memento mori for distant selves, since the person who read them no longer exists." That "underline" is another value-laden term, which sets up the pay-off of "undermine" (underpin would have been more accurate than underline, but the rhyme demands otherwise). The implication is that we are trapped in our past and can't move on, which sounds more like the observation of a psychoanalyst than a philosopher (though there is perhaps a hint of existentialism). There is also an obvious contradiction in Baggini insisting on the one hand that we must shed our old books to be true to our contemporary selves while on the other hand recommending that we retain a conventional canon - "Now when I look I see only books that are classics" - which is surely more pretentious than keeping hold of all those old Viz annuals. A better question than why is it so hard to get rid of our books is why do we hang on to some in particular? To talk of "classics" is to avoid the personal, which sits oddly with Baggini's claim that books are a mere projection of the ego.

There are two further problems with the idea of a purge. The first is that books may be literal memento mori, inherited from dead parents or others. In the case of a bookish person, they may be the only significant objects they leave behind. Baggini baldly states "we don’t keep old clothing that no longer fits, or beautiful pots and crockery that is unusable" - but in fact we do keep such things, if they connect us to the dead or to our own achievements (that old football shirt, that wedding dress). The second is that this view requires Baggini to ignore that books also project meaning into the future. Many of the books we acquire remain unread for months or even years. This isn't necessarily pretension or the consequence of retail therapy. They are an investment in a future self, an act of faith in self-development. In some cases, particularly non-fiction, the book is an insurance policy against potential future reference. This essentially academic approach to building a collection has itself become a post-Wikipedia conceit: the antilibrary (supposedly inspired by Umberto Eco) in which your collection of books is an expression of your ignorance rather than your knowledge. 

But this is perhaps too systematic an approach, just as weeding your library of old novels or out-of-date travel guides sounds like the literary equivalent of dry January. Indeed, is it even reasonable to refer to the clumps of books dotted around our homes as a library that needs such careful curation? In Baggini's telling it begins to sound like an estate and you wonder if culling his collection of books is a metaphorical hint to his potential heirs not to get their hopes up. Our politics is suffused with inheritance and intergenerational friction, like a Balzac novel. Is the urge to prune our libraries displaced guilt over a property windfall, or maybe just a general desire to erase the past? But our books define our future as well. As a projection into that future, fiction is often closer to a promise than the speculative contingency of non-fiction. We imagine that we will be better able to appreciate Anna Karenina in our 40s or The Old Man and the Sea in our 60s, so we hang on to them expectantly, even if we bought and first read them in our 20s. Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is rarely bought and devoured in one go, like a Sci-Fi or fantasy series, and not just because of its length. It is a commitment to the slow unfolding of future time as much as a languid recapture of the past. Likewise, Joyce's Ulysses must hold the record as the book most often started but not finished, largely because it is approached as a single narrative rather than a collection of experimental novellas that can be read in any order.

The books we hold on to are more likely to be works that defeated us rather than favourites. They remain a challenge. If you're lending a book to a friend, it's probably one you read and enjoyed rather than one you gave up half way through in frustration. In recommending that we lose the books that we never completed, or even started, Baggini is advocating an honesty about our own limits, an admission that our investment in a future self will not pay off: "To get rid of these books requires confronting some uncomfortable truths. It is to admit failure. To concede that our aspiration to become more widely read, more knowledgeable, more well-rounded, has not come to fruition. Worse, it never will". But, again, this ignores that some books represent appointments with ourselves at a time when we think we'll be ready to appreciate them. You don't cancel appointments because they are far in the future. This lifetime perspective is actually a traditional view, embodied in books of consolation in the face of grief or death. Indeed, it was quite normal for gifts of such books in the past to be made in the expectation that they wouldn't be read for many years.

At the heart of Baggini's argument is a very old philosophical stance, dating back to the impermanence of Heraclitus and the Stoic rejection of vanity: "Letting go of such books is as important as accepting that a wonderful holiday, concert or meal has come to an end. The right way to take pleasure is in recognition of its transience. Even knowledge must also be allowed to pass. Holding on to books seems to be a denial that what enters our heads is also destined to exit them". But behind this lurks some very modern attitudes. The idea that you should cull your books, only retaining those of highest value suggests a categorical division between commodities and assets. Baggini happily gets rid of books signed by the authors: "This does require tearing out the front page with the signed dedication, which at first felt like a sacrilegious desecration. But I’ve come to see it differently: the fact that I want to keep that page even when I’ve decided the book should move on honours the author rather than insults them". A more cynical view is that the signature is an asset whose value may well appreciate while the rest of the book was merely a commodity that will probably depreciate. Binning books, or ripping them apart, is surely more revealing of the ego than simply letting them gather dust on the shelves.