One day I came home to find the keeper of our household library sorting through old books by the front door. I idly turned over a few volumes and suddenly spotted two books on flowers from the Congshu Jicheng series. That set runs to roughly four thousand volumes. Lose two, and the whole thing becomes incomplete.
Even writing about this feels faintly alarming. Everyone knows books are things to cherish, to treasure, to love. So how could they provoke hatred? And yet at times they do exactly that. Not just irritation, but a sustained, muttering resentment, the sort that makes one want to throw every last volume out and be left with a bare, echoing room.
The first difficulty is obvious enough: space.
My father is ninety this year, and he has been collecting books for at least seventy years. The collection has survived repeated upheavals and “baptisms,” as one might call them, and even after all that, it remains substantial. Once upon a time the books were gathered in one place, arranged shelf after shelf, with something of the dignity of a private library. But families expand. The younger generation had no desire to live in dim little rooms cut off from sunlight, and when they saw that the so-called library was bright and airy, they began to resent the books occupying it. “The books have squeezed people out of the house” was already my mother’s complaint when she was alive.
I have heard of an elderly scholar who always let his books occupy the main rooms. My generation has no such refinement. We believe human beings, being the most sentient of creatures, deserve the sun, the air, and the view from the window; books, after all, were written by people. Surely people should have precedence over the things they wrote.
So the books were broken up and distributed from room to room. My own cramped little space ended up inheriting several shelves of old volumes: Liezi, Baopuzi, Gengcangzi, Huainanzi, Yandanzi... remote books, doubly remote, mysterious and of no practical use to me. There is also the Huang Qing Jing Jie, whose very title seems to exhale stale antiquity. Meanwhile my own drafts and notes can only be wedged into the gaps between these old tomes, where a sliver of paper edge peeks out pitifully, almost lost in the haze of accumulated centuries.
The second source of resentment is the bookcases themselves.
Most are already half a century old. Some are beautifully antique, with large seal-script characters on them that still have not been conclusively deciphered. I bear them no grudge for that. What is intolerable is that many of the cases have no handles. Perhaps they were made without such a device, though one would think that unlikely. In any case, they are very hard to open and close. To shut them, one has to line up the joints just right; once they are closed, they may refuse to open again, and then a screwdriver must be brought in—after a long search for the screwdriver, of course.
Other cabinet doors have the opposite problem: they are too loose. If you bend down to look for a book in the lower compartment, the door above may suddenly drop and smack you on the head with a loud crack, enough to leave you dizzy. This is no trivial inconvenience; it is practically a matter of life and death. How could one not resent such things? Sometimes after dinner, when the whole family is sitting together in a genial circle of talk and laughter, or deep in the night when everyone is sound asleep, there comes a sudden tremendous crash that sends the heart racing. One thinks it must be an earthquake, or some sort of explosion, and leaps up or throws on clothes to investigate—only to discover that yet another cabinet door has fallen off.
Strictly speaking, none of these problems is insoluble. They have simply been allowed to persist because I am no good at managing a household, and that includes managing books. But the unease the books give me goes deeper than inconvenience. When I think about it, that unease divides into two parts: guilt and regret. Those are not so easily dealt with.
There is a saying by Deng Tuo: “To shut the door and read through all the books in one’s own collection”—one of life’s pleasures. And indeed, there is a special delight in discovering, among the old books at home, exactly the volume one has been wanting to read. But I can see clearly that in this lifetime I will never know the joy of reading through all that is stored here. It is not merely that I cannot read them all. I cannot even put them in order.
There are several reasons. First, there is no time; and when time is stolen from busier obligations, there are still people and matters more urgent than books to look after. Second, there is no strength. Sometimes one has to set aside even the most important task and simply sit down to catch one’s breath. Third, I suffer from allergies and cannot spend long with dust-laden books that have sat untouched for years.
So the family elected my husband as librarian.
Over the years, as we have shifted from room to room within this house, he has carried books so many times that the total distance of his trudging with armloads of them may well exceed a hundred miles. During each move, some things with no value for preservation are also discarded. It was during one such clearing-out that I returned home and found him sorting old books at the front door. A casual rummage, and there they were: two flower books from Congshu Jicheng. In a set of about four thousand volumes, those two matter. Remove them, and what remains is damaged.
My anger rose and then subsided. He has worked too hard; how could he inspect every single book with perfect care? Then I began to wonder whether other valuable books had also been thrown away. Then I blamed myself for my own incompetence, for failing to shoulder the responsibility I ought to have borne. Resentment turned outward and inward by turns, and in the end I found myself treating the books as the original culprits.
Books are also the source of endless regret.
In this home, where we are forever knocking into things amid heaps of old volumes, I am constantly discovering that a book I wanted to read, or one I particularly treasured, has disappeared. Once I came upon an English version of the Yangzi. I read a page or two and found it unexpectedly poetic. I meant to continue, set it aside for the moment, and never found it again. Another time I found five lectures in English by Lu Zhiwei on Tang poetry. I wanted to read them too, put the book aside, and again it vanished. Later I saw the title posted in the holdings of a large library, but naturally I was not going to make a special trip to borrow it.
The most painful loss of all was a facsimile edition from the Siku Quanshu of Xiao Yuncong’s fully illustrated Li Sao. It was a large-format volume, beautifully bound in brocade, with striking large characters. I wanted to sit down and savor it properly. But then—it too was gone.
Perhaps it is still somewhere here, in these very rooms, hidden as if by deep clouds on a mountain path. The librarian says he has searched everywhere without success. I always feel that if I looked for it myself, it might somehow appear. Yet I never do find it, and the book never reemerges.
What a waste, what a pity.
At moments like that I think it might have been better never to have had these books at all. Then there would be no guilt, and no regret either. How much lighter life would feel. For someone as incapable as I am, that may well be the wisest course. But I am still in possession of my senses, and cannot truly turn all the books out of the house. So I go on living among them, making do, and from time to time resenting them all over again.
That is what I mean by hating books.