A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [14]
I had made one terrible mistake. When Father went off to work, I was free to do whatever I wanted with my corner of the bookcase, but I had a wholly childish view about how these things were done. So it was that I arranged my books in order of height. The tallest books were the ones that by now were beneath my dignity, children's books, in rhyme, with pictures, the books that had been read to me when I was a toddler. I did it because I wanted to fill the whole length of shelf that had been allotted to me. I wanted my section to be packed full, crowded, overflowing, like my father's shelves. I was still in a state of euphoria when Father came home from work, cast a shocked glance toward my bookshelf, and then, in total silence, gave me a long hard look that I shall never forget: it was a look of contempt, of bitter disappointment beyond anything that could be expressed in words, almost a look of utter genetic despair. Finally he hissed at me with pursed lips: "Have you gone completely crazy? Arranging them by height? Have you mistaken your books for soldiers? Do you think they are some kind of honor guard? The firemen's band on parade?"
Then he stopped talking. There came a long, awesome silence from my father, a sort of Gregor Samsa silence, as though I had turned into a cockroach before his eyes. From my side too there was a guilty silence, as though I really had been some kind of wretched insect all along, and now my secret was out and everything was lost.
At the end of the silence Father began talking, and in the space of twenty minutes he revealed to me the facts of life. He held nothing back. He initiated me into the deepest secrets of the librarian's lore: he laid bare the main highway as well as the forest tracks, dizzying prospects of variations, nuances, fantasies, exotic avenues, daring schemes, and even eccentric whims. Books can be arranged by subject, by alphabetical order of authors' names, by series or publishers, in chronological order, by languages, by topics, by areas and fields, or even by place of publication. There are so many different ways.
And so I learned the secret of diversity. Life is made up of different avenues. Everything can happen in one of several ways, according to different musical scores and parallel logics. Each of these parallel logics is consistent and coherent on its own terms, perfect in itself, indifferent to all the others.
In the days that followed I spent hours on end arranging my little library, twenty or thirty books that I dealt and shuffled like a pack of cards, rearranging them in all sorts of different ways.
So I learned from books the art of composition, not from what was in them but from the books themselves, from their physical being. They taught me about that dizzying no-man's-land or twilight zone between the permitted and the forbidden, between the legitimate and the eccentric, between the normative and the bizarre. This lesson has remained with me ever since. By the time I discovered love, I was no greenhorn. I knew that there were different menus. I knew that there was a motorway and a scenic route, and also unfrequented byways where the foot of man had barely trodden. There were permitted things that were almost forbidden and forbidden things that were almost permitted. There were so many different ways.
Occasionally my parents allowed me to take books from my father's shelves outside into the yard to shake off the dust. No more than three books at a time, so as not to get them out of order, so that each one would get back to its proper place. It was a heavy but delicious responsibility, because I found the smell of book dust so intoxicating that I sometimes forgot my task, my duty, my responsibilities, and stayed outside until my mother became anxious and dispatched my father on a rescue mission to make sure I was not suffering from heatstroke, that I had not been bitten by a dog, and he always discovered me curled up