There it stood, in the heat of a June Sunday, past the railing yet not quite at the edge of the slope down to the stone channel where the Botič brook is allowed to end its course. Three distinct stacks of books, and behind them a cardboard box with more inside, the ‘Made in China’ inscription mocking the eye with the very pedestrianness of its irony.
Abandoned books always carry a special sense of the tragic. However much the web may swarm with how-the-mighty-are-fallen evocations through documentation of the carcasses of shopping centers or cars, the decay of the consumer item has always lain dormant within it, always the dream – as the early Surrealists knew well – of its own destruction. The book, however, has always been (up to the dawn of the Kindle, that is) a knowledge-capsule launched outwards towards the uncertain future, and to see its trajectory clearly at an end makes it clear that the contents of the knowledge-capsule no longer have significance for those around it. A repository of information, a ‘technology’ of human culture – now an inert object, only so many grams of wood-pulp.
True, some readers of a certain generation may object, but what about the case of books where their discarding or pulping is a festive liberation, an overthrowing of the tyranny wielded by malign ideas? What of the tons of unreadable Marxist jargon, the deliberately feeble versifications of sanctioned poetasters, the third-rate novelists singing the praises of heroic cement-plant engineers? Wasn’t the ejection of this mind-battering ballast from the libraries, the paper-purge of 1990, really a happy event? Undoubtedly the liberation was real – yet even then, the sight of the mountains of yellowing paper from the ‘Evening Schools of Marxism-Leninism’ evoked, more than anything else, the ultimate intellect-devouring futility of the Communist experiment, the true tragedy of the lost decades, in a way that much more established and conventional symbols of victory (broken statues in Ozymandian heaps) never could. And conversely, the echoes of this enormous cataclysm were felt in the free world as well. One of the most haunting photographic cycles of recent years, the work of Hungarian photographer Gabriella Csoszó , depicts the final days of the Radio Free Europe library at the end of its tenure in Munich, where victim and oppressor, dissident and apparatchik, are consigned to the same metaphorical casket of the banana box.
Even when put up for sale, not merely sent off to the pulp mill, the occasional orphaned volume can mutely suggest its own tale of the vicious reverses of history. Well into the Seventies, from what I’ve been told, the second-hand bookshops of the entire stretch of ‘formerly German’ lands still formed installation-monuments to the shared (if still morally incomparable) tragedies of murder and displacement. As much as the standard Prague ‘antikvariat’ is now a depressing charnel-house of mediocre middlebrow prose and boring typography, there is always – even in this atmosphere reeking as much of Kojève’s and Fukuyama’s dreary posthistoire as of rotting binding-paste – the chance for an untold tale to emerge. For instance, the Hogarth Press first edition of Virginia Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts, purchased nearly 15 years ago for 60 (!) CZK, very likely the property of the wife of one of the Czech RAF pilots , only to end up sold off with all the unwanted material effects of the deceased….
Yet the very possibility, however slight, of rescue by an enlightened reader offered by the bookshop leaves such cases far removed from the much deeper pathos of the street discard. One shelf up from Between the Acts stands a German translation of Stendhal, Rot und Schwarz, the Gothic type informs us, on the flyleaf stand the words “Leipzig 1932”. No price penciled into the cover: the place of acquisition was a cardboard crate beside a refuse bin in the upper reaches of Manhattan, and there is little need for imagination in the course of the trans-oceanic odyssey from 1933 to 1997, except of course my own sense, indeed compulsion, that it had to be among those few volumes I had shipped by overpriced airfreight in the opposite direction.
Of course, the same impulse, in a different century and continent, guides me to the book-cairn past the railing’s edge. First among the volumes, I make out the Kalevala, almost certainly in Josef Holeček’s translation, by the cover design clearly pre-Brussels Style if not pre-war. A good addition to the library, I think, also making out the title of the dull brown volume beneath it, a Czech-English dictionary of geological terms. Beyond, inside the box, are clearly several art books… and then I see, only centimeters away: a large pile of dog feces of a revolting reddish hue. No chance, contaminated as if by purpose (recalling the disgusting habit of restaurants in the US of pouring bleach or other chemicals over their discarded food to keep the homeless away). No chance for saving… yet as I continue, still thinking about what I’d seen, perhaps it is for the better. There, in its present form, the book-object most accurately preserves what it should: preserves the record of a life of its time, the tale of a person of definite cultivation and humanistic tastes, nonetheless making a living in the exact sciences as one of the few honorable refuges when Communist rule made the humanities precisely the reverse of anything related to cultivation or taste. Like the ovoos of Mongolia, with that special impermanence shared by Buddhist and shamanist traditions alike, this tombstone for a life lived as circumstances best permitted will stay for a few days, sacrilegiously sanctified by the fecal barrier.
Yes, the dog droppings will also save it from the pulping press, I think later, recalling the most logical literary reference here, Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude. Hanťa, as we all remember, takes his final jump into his own press after he learns of his replacement in the job by healthy young normalization-types who even go so far as to drink lemonade rather than beer while compacting. I’m not sure what Hanťa’s spirit would think of a warm can of “Deep National Premium”, but I pull one from my shopping bag on the return and, in his memory, pollute the Botič with its contents.