Dust to Dust

With trusted news sources, medical experts, public servants and late-night comedians broadcasting from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, we are privy to a backdrop of private book collections and their organizing principles.

I find such unexpected glimpses illuminating. As Henry David Thoreau said, “It’s not what you look at that matters. It is what you see.”

• The many books on CNN’s Dana Bash’ shelves are as tightly packed and ramrod straight as you might expect. The supremely professional journalist appears with nary a lock of hair out of place or a thought ill considered. Stacks yet to read attest to her inquiring mind.
• By contrast, rumpled medical experts, tipping back in swivel chairs, tend to live and let live with sliding stacks of books and manila folders or hunch before rows of matching medical tomes. No small feat trying to save humanity.
• Former Acting Labor Secretary in the Obama Administration, Seth Harris, interviewed on MSNBC, has narrow bookcases behind his high-backed chair. The shelves hold thickish books. I figure the books are crammed with statistics about working Americans; that number sinking when 3.28 million filed jobless claims.

Literary Voyeur

For comic relief, I watched TV’s Seth Meyer’s segment about the miracle which D.J. Trump envisions – packing all the churches on Easter Sunday – perhaps while he slips away for a celebratory round of golf and a “TOLD YOU SO!!!!” mean tweet.

While relishing 16 minutes to laugh out loud, I tilted my head to read what titles I could of the books lining Seth’s wall case. Lo and behold, Seth still has The Thorn Birds.

Everybody had a copy of the 1977 blockbuster by Australian author Colleen McCullough. By the turn of the last century, libraries offered dusty dozens of the book in their sale tents, tossed in with Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Erich Segal’s Love Story.

With each move of a lifetime, I’ve donated boxes of books to libraries. Still, I check what remains in my bookcase for old nuggets I treasure or overlooked.

Treasure

I spot a yellowed paperback of the 1959 comic science fiction, The Sirens of Titans, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Having read the tale more than once, I recall his sense of irony and marvel at his playful mind; this after enduring the horrors of World War II. He died in 2007 (or scrambled aboard a golden spaceship bound for his version of Paradise).

Vonnegut would grasp the absurdity of a carnival-sideshow president running the country like his dysfunctional family business. It is priceless - or soon will be. Vonnegut might even kick in a few bucks to promote any grand America Is Risen rally.

The author of Catch 22, Joseph Heller, who nailed the profiteering and insanely indifferent character of Milo Minderbinder, would get this mercenary president. He could have seen Trump coming (or not seen him), in Major Major Major Major, a character who slithers out the window to escape a buck landing on his desk.

Going, Going ...

Now what?

• I’m all for escaping into books and lingering over the mastery of my idols.
• I’m all for diving back into the first draft of a fiction manuscript when I’m not watching the news.
• I’m all for catching glimpses of what admirable people read, whether to extract a clue (as in Seth - who knew?) or affirmation. These people are in the crosshairs more than I, trying to guide us through an otherworld.

Note: A report from an infectious disease professor at Johns Hopkins University, passed along to me in an email, lists avenues of virus contagion. For instance, if you, "use a feather duster, the virus molecules float in the air for up to 3 hours, and can lodge in your nose."

For new-time’s sake, I’ll revisit the 61-year old Sirens … and when the all-clear sounds for Covid-19, I’ll dust.