One recent night I e-mailed a photo of my bookshelf to a writer at The New Yorker. It’s hard to recall quite what seized my shy person’s soul to cause me to upload a rectangle of my private life into a stranger’s computer across the continent. I do know I felt wonder to read in a national forum—The Book Bench—an article about analyzing a person by examining a sample of her bookshelf. It’s a kind of palm reading I’d pay 10 bucks for, actually, and here in the online magazine was a picture of a bookshelf belonging to a young woman in New Jersey with the writer Macy Halford’s speculation about the nature of the book owner. And there was also an invitation to submit one’s own bookshelf for scrutiny, and as my camera was on my desk by the glowing screen of my laptop, I framed my shelves and sent them along whimsically, hungrily and without delay.
Next to such acts as entering a love sonnet in “A Prairie Home Companion” contest that attracts 4,000 entries at a time, or publishing poems in literary journals—“like typing your sentences on a paper airplane and throwing them into the Grand Canyon” I used to tell my students—launching a photo from my life to The New Yorker ranked high to very high on the Introvert’s-Futile-Attempt-to-Connect scale.
I’d already been unusually social on the day I e-mailed my bookshelf to a stranger. I’d walked in Walnut Canyon down the paved Island Trail to a sunny comfortable place to sit. I wanted to celebrate spring emerging between snowstorms. Settled in by a twist of juniper I felt a healing winter’s stillness clinging to the canyon walls. I daydreamed about a life tucked into cliffs: imagine knowing this bit of rock and the five dwellings visible across the canyon and not much more. Knowing the smells, sounds and movements of a few humans and hundreds of animals and plants. No voicemail, e-mail, snailmail, messaging. Just the vibrations of these trees, these trails, this sun. It created a glow in my very private heart. The small commotion of animal feet causing a rock to roll on a slope across the canyon was company enough.
I stirred myself to return to my town rooms because I’d planned a dinner inspired by a book: 641.5 W877. 1997. I’d found it as I explored the caverns of shelves in the downtown library. In “A Painter’s Kitchen” by Margaret Wood, the author is 24 when she begins work as a companion to the 90-year-old Georgia O’Keeffe. The descriptions of her five years tending O’Keeffe’s garden, kitchen and table in Abiquiu gave me the gift of intimacy with a life that has long fascinated me. (Once a friend and I crept close to those high adobe walls and boosted each other up to peer into that very garden, eager for a glimpse of a life that looked good to us: a quiet, soulful, private life devoted to art.) For supper, I made page 58, Baked Chicken with Lemon; I was especially pleased to get the chicken for 88 cents a pound at Basha’s.
After dinner I returned to YouTube to follow up on thoughts I’d been having about articulate conversation. I watched Dick Cavett ask Ingmar Bergman about his childhood. Bergman described his first viewing of a film at age 5. He said, “It was such an enormous experience I was ill a week after … I had to go to bed; I cried.” This from the man who will make 70 films of his own in a long life to come. He goes on to say that his sensitivity is why he doesn’t care to go abroad. “I have such a lot of impressions the whole time.” He doesn’t want to become overwhelmed by leaving his country to meet another universe of impressions.
It was a nice weekend in the small country of my rooms, the local woods and the inside of my head. I baked myself on a rock in a canyon where ancients whispered. I sat down to dinner with the ghost of Georgia O’Keeffe, I met Ingmar Bergman, and I saw my bookshelves in a new way: a tiny rectangle caught in the currents of a rich inner life.
