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Can the borrowers be thwarted? There are attempts. Some hopefuls glue EX LIBRIS stickers to the inside covers (clever drawings of animals wearing glasses, and so forth)—as if the presence of Latin and the imprint of a name were so formidable as to reverse a motor reflex. It never works. One might try slipping false jackets on one's books—a cover for The Secret Agent disguising Utility Rates in Ottawa: A Woman's View. But book borrowers are merely despicable, not stupid; they tend to leaf before they pluck. Besides, the interesting thing about the feeling of loss when a book is borrowed is that the book's quality rarely matters. So mysterious is the power of books in our lives that every loss is a serious loss, every hole in the shelf a crater.
And this, of course, is the key to the sense of helplessness in this matter. Our books are ourselves, our characters, our insulation against those very people who would take away our books. There, on that wall, Ahab storms. Hamlet mulls. Molly Bloom says yes yes yes. Keats looks into Chapman, who looks at Homer, who looks at Keats. All this happens on a bookshelf continually—while you are out walking the dog, or pouting or asleep. The Punic Wars rage; Emma Bovary pines; Bacon exhorts others to behave the way he never could. Here French is spoken. There Freud. So go war and peace, pride and prejudice, decline and fall, perpetually in motions as sweeping as Milton's or as slight as Emily Dickinson considering the grass. Every evening Gatsby looks at Daisy's green light, which is green forever. Every morning Gregor Samsa discovers that he has been transformed into a giant insect.
These things are not what we have, but what we are. Leigh Hunt exulted: "Nothing can deprive me of my value for such treasures. I can help the appreciation of them while I last, and love them till I die; and perhaps, if fortune turns her face in kindness upon me before I go, I may chance, some quiet day, to lay my over-beating temples on a book, and so have the death I most envy." Plato was reputedly found dead with a book under his pillow, Petrarch in his library with his elbow resting on an open page. Books gave them more than solace. They were their lives extended, a way of touching eternity. "Go, litel book!" wrote Chaucer at the end of Troilus and Criseyde, sending his work on a journey that no man could complete.
Small wonder, then, that people will do almost everything for books, to acquire and preserve them, to prevent their banning or burning. Stories of manuscripts lost or destroyed are especially heartbreaking because one knows how ephemeral ideas and images are, what vast effort it takes to dust off the confusions, tune out the noise, and create those books that, for whatever inadequacies they may display, still set the mind in order for a time, giving it a spine and a binding. There may be no more pleasing picture in the world than that of a child peering into a book—the past and the future entrancing each other. Nor does anyone look quite so attractive as with a book in hand. How many people have fallen in love merely at the sight of someone reading?