iLiza's eyes

In my house growing up, we always had books. In the first house I lived in, my parents built a bookshelf in the living room before I was born, so that for as far back as I remember, there has always been a wall of books in my life. When we moved across the street when I was in kindergarten, one of the first things my parents did was have a book shelf built in the new living room. The book shelf was twice the size of the one from our old house, but somehow we had enough books. I have always valued books because I have always admired that wall.

Most of the books on the wall belonged to my dad. There was, and still is, a complete set of encyclopedias from the 1950s, every law book he ever used, books in latin, paperback novels with covers that are slowly disconnecting from the literature within and some history books too. When you take a book down from the shelf, there's always the chance that you'll find his words in it-- his jotted notes in that flawless handwriting of his calling to the present from 30 years ago. I think my father saved every book he ever read and preserved them on our bookshelf as a testiment to his brilliance and his profound respect for academia.

In the past few years, I have started to do the same. When it comes to the end of each semester, and my books have been read and highlighted and yet still preserved under my ginger care, I don't even think of selling them back. For some reason, I feel that I will one day need them again, I will one day want to reference back, and that need to re-read them trumps my desire to make a profit. If a book has my jotted notes, it also has a piece of my brain, and thus cannot be let go, just as my father's 20-something brilliance is still up on that shelf and taught me how to love reading through that wall.

Perhaps I save my books because I want to build my own wall one day: one that will fill a side of my living room and imprint in my children the value of all those words, the inspiration in all those pages. Perhaps I look to preserve myself in the same way my father did so accidentally: through my immediate responses in the margins of page after page.

When I was in high school, we had to read the book, "The Great Gatsby." I remember that it was on the book shelf, and my dad found it and gave it to me. It was his copy, it was old and yellowed and gingerly used, just like all the books up there. I bought my own copy of the book though, and I ended up filling every inch with highlights and margin notes, comments that I still go back to today in awe because I find they sum up humanity in ways I can only dream of.

No, I never wrote in a single one of my father's books. That was his wall, that is his memory. And I will create my own.

posted by iliza @ 3:35 PM