Tuesday
I’m currently reading and very much enjoying Ruth Ozeki’s novel The Book of Form & Emptiness, including one passage that articulates something I’ve long suspected: that the book you most need at a critical point in your life will somehow find its way to you.
For years I’ve held this scientifically unprovable notion. I’ll be walking through a bookstore or library and somehow come across just the right book for the moment. In Ozeki’s novel, such a moment occurs in a craft store:
She needed to get started on the memory quilt project, so a quick stop [in the quilting aisle] would be motivating, but first she had to get past the books. This was her danger zone, and now she steeled herself… The last thing she needed was more books. She gripped the handle of her cart and pushed forward, but just as she was passing the New Releases table, the oddest thing happened. Maybe the table was rickety, or maybe she bumped it on her way by, but something caused one little book to jump off the pile and land inside her shopping cart.
The book is Tidy Magic: The Ancient Zen Art of Clearing Your Clutter and Revolutionizing Your Life, and I’m not far enough into Ozeki’s novel to know what role it will play in Annabelle’s life. But because Ozeki has made her novel itself into a character, with its own speaking voice, we get first-hand testimony that books do indeed have agency. Tidy Magic finds its way to a woman who needs it because that’s what books do:
Of course, it wasn’t actually the universe doing the providing. The universe can’t make a book launch itself off a table. Only a book can do that, although it is no easy feat. There are fables in our world of powerful tomes with the ability to levitate and move by themselves, but since few of us ever get to see this happen, we tend to assume these are just talltales. Books do migrate—look at the pile next to your bed—but lacking legs, we lack mobility, and generally we must rely on you to move us from place to place. To that end, we do our best to make ourselves attractive to you, with our gaudy covers and catchy titles, but Tidy Magic was not likethat. It was a quiet book, not pushy in the least, and yet, it had this extraordinary power to self-propel. Imagine the strength of purpose that requires! Needles to say, we [the collective world of books] were impressed.
So there you have it. We already are aware that books often know us better than we know ourselves. Now we learn that books have special ways of getting that information to us.