When I was in Cambridge last week, I had coffee with an old friend who has become quite a successful novelist and teaches at one of the universities around there. We started talking about all the stacks of books around, and she professed that she was saddened by them, and by the fact that when we died, all that work of reading them was gone. She started talking about her mother, and all the reading she had done, and all the books that had been around her various abodes when she passed, especially some vacation cabin in Canada. "My husband had a piece about in The New Yorker." I confessed that I had read it (I'm pretty sure). Her husband is a well-known (and justly so) critic, and also teaches nearby.
This morning, as I made my way through my morning reading routine amongst all of my books as well as a couple of papers Natalie wrote this last semester, the deep irony of what she was saying came to me. Because, far from being lost when we die, in the best cases (which happen often unless we are complete assholes), the digestion of the texts and the culture of it lives on in scholars and readers and is bequeathed to those around us.
And this is particularly true of those who, like my friend and her husband, live and die by the pen.
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