MitgliedDoctorDoolittle(Hey, You, Sir, Slacker)

All my life I’ve been fascinated by libraries, my parents’, my school’s, the public ones, the Dewey decimal system, ancient libraries, old bookshops that bought and sold collections of the learned class, and finally, my own. I get shivers when I walk into our study, as if a thousand eyes are watching, hoping that I’ll pull theirs off the shelf, gaze into them for a while, and read their thoughts.
I used to think that it might be vain or foolish to collect books, especially ones that I’d not yet read. But that’s the point, they’re there to be read, to be at hand when the right moment comes. Ten years ago, I finally got to reading The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, a gift from my high school sweetheart. It had waited there patiently for thirty years. Recently, I pulled out The Best American Essays of the Twentieth Century, a gift from my daughter twenty years ago. It was still as fresh and new as the day I got it when I read her inscription, thumbed through the titles, and put it on the shelf next to her own binder of collected poems. But who cares if I haven’t read everything yet? There are at least 300 books on my list of ones to be read!

Studied intellectual and cultural history (undergrad) and technology and culture (grad).