Now confined in our second lockdown, we are confronted with the background, which may have engaged us only intermittently before. The Twitter account mercilessly exposes those caught in the act of self-promotion: Yanis Varoufakis’s positioning of his book behind his bald pate, David Cameron unhappily and unluckily captured in a Zoom ‘waiting room’ tossing aside books on World War Two to make room for his biography.īefore the advent of Zoom our lives took place in the foreground of experience: at work, on vacation, in restaurants, outside of the home. Much ink was spilt during the first lockdown on the topic: the Duchess of Cambridge’s carefully arranged (and clearly untouched) hardback classics, Ben Fogle’s ‘rainbow’ bookcase out of which he appears like a kind of leprechaun, Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon’s vast library which she surely needs a dewey decimal system to navigate. To share yourself is to share your shelf. Like Montaigne’s personal essay, the bookshelf has become a form of self-fashioning, a way of arranging ourselves into being, one hardback at a time. Since Zoom entered our lives, the bookshelf has become the Zoom backdrop du jour, a conscious curation of ourselves that we give to the public. Until this year, I had always felt rather rude examining other people’s bookshelves, as if to delve too deep into their collection would be an act of unashamed voyeurism. Since I got married, my husband’s books now number among my own political biographies next to novels, a literary record of our lives before we met, pages and pages of the past. Brideshead Revisited next to Healing the Child Within. Alan Bennett certainly thought so: ‘A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.’ Journeying across my own bookshelves I see the spines of my life, not curated or color-coded, but jammed in messily and haphazardly, out of chronological order, just like experience itself. To cast your eye across someone’s bookshelves is to understand them.
0 kommentar(er)
