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A private library of good size is an insolent form of riches, and the desire to have more books is difficult to rationalize, especially in view of the fact that you do not or cannot read them all but, as Bonnet makes clear, still you might. The bibliophile is, after all, like a sultan or khan who has countless wives already but another two or three are always irresistible. Reading is a pastime and can be regarded as such, but it can also be supremely important. Walter Benjamin expressed it off-handedly; he read, he said, “just to get in touch.” I take this to mean in touch with things otherwise impossible to embrace rather than merely stay abreast of, although a certain ambiguity is the mark of accomplished writers. Benjamin’s life ended tragically. He fled from the Nazis but was trapped, unable to cross into Spain, and he committed suicide. But that was the end only of his mortal life. He exists still with a kind of shy radiance and the continued interest and esteem of readers. He is dead like everyone else, except that he is not. You might say the same of a movie star except that it seems to me that stars are viewed years after with a kindly curiosity. They are antique and perhaps still charming. A writer does not age in the same way. He or she is not imprisoned in a performance.

Read The Paradise of the Library, James Salter’s introduction to Jacques Bonnet’s Phantoms of the Bookshelves, in the New Yorker.

Since Salter died last month, the New Yorker has published more pieces on Salter than it did stories BY Salter (A total of one: Last Night).

Drogon the cat is so massive he totaled one of our smaller bookshelves by jumping up and down on it to reach the higher shelf. We were going to buy a new bookshelf when it occurred to us that we could make room in our existing shelves by donating books to the Filipinas Heritage Library at Ayala Museum. The books could live together on a shelf as “The Jessica Zafra Collection”, and we could visit them whenever we wanted. If you get library membership, you can read them.

The library agreed, but they’ll only take Filipiniana so we’re keeping our old science-fiction paperbacks, your loss. Still we managed to round up a hundred or so volumes, so we even have space for some new books nya-ha-haa.

(No, we’re not donating the collected works of Arnel Salgado, we’ve done enough damage by praising the irony-challenged.)