My bedside dresser is a disaster. Don’t take my word for it. That’s a photo of it you see here. Too many books piled in every direction, about to fall over. My wife Peggy counts them from time to time, calling out the growing number so that I can’t fail to hear it. She refuses to straighten the piles herself, much as she’d like to. She wants me to do it myself.

Which I will do, right after I finish this post.

One book, from the library, will have to disappear in two days. It’s Can Xue’s novel Love in the New Millenium. I haven’t even cracked it! But I’d love to. It starts out:

The widow Niu Cuilan rose before the sky was light to wash, comb her hair, and dress because today her lover Wei Bo would probably come to see her.

A simple scene, right? observed calmly from the third person, its elements tidily placed, one by one—widow, her name, the state of the heavens, the procedure of dressing and her motive—yet jostled in its complacency by “probably.” Well, will Wei Bo come or won’t he?

But no, I lost my chance to find that out. I’ve been so enamored of David Bentley Hart’s All Things are Full of Gods as well as Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Woods, W. D. Snodgrass’s The Führer Bunker, Isak Dinesen’s Anecdotes of Destiny, Roger Penrose’s The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind, Tim Hunt’s The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers(a tome of 750 pages), Richard Reeves’s A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist, Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café, all jumbled precariously in the top layer of the piles because most likely to be grabbed—so enamored that I forgot all about Xue’s book, so deep has it sunk, down among books I know well but just like to have near me to delve into from time to time for love of their familiar but always invigorating sentences: books like Austen’s Emma, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, my father’s 1895 Greenough and Kittredge Latin edition of Virgil’s Aeneid (its pages yellowed, dogeared, pencil-marked), a venerable 1933 edition of Modern Library’s The Essayes of Montaigne in John Florio’s translation, and oops, didn’t see it at first, a book I haven’t opened for a year at least, Adrian Frazier’s biography of George Moore, with its most unpromising title: George Moore, 1852-1933.

OK, OK, to start the cleaning process somewhere, clearly George Moore is the first to go. But I can’t resist opening its 600 pages to the yellow post-it I use as a marker to see where I left off. I read, on p. 221:

Moore was a courageous person, but his courage was not inconsistent with terror.

What a wonderful sentence! It all comes back to me. So typical of Frazier’s amused scrutiny of George Moore’s aggressive vanities, his cheekiness as a stripling in France ingratiating himself with the great Manet and the great Zola, his tireless but hopeless efforts back home in London to become a writer the equal of fellow Irishmen George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats. Frazier’s irony captures the man’s endearing absurdity perfectly. For it was not a great hero like Achilles whom Moore was facing in this sentence, but his publisher’s challenge to him to write a play of real merit for a change.

And right there, reader, you see the trap, you see the problem, you see how one short sentence like that in a book placed casually on the top of a bedside dresser can so attract others that before you know it you’re in mortal danger of dying in an avalanche. Or worse.

Because by connecting disasters with reading, I’m thinking of a book that for a long time used to lie buried in the pile on my dresser top but now is back where it belongs, on a shelf in our living room where it can cause no harm and can actually be found if someone wants it.

The book I’m thinking about is a spine-snapped, taped, and bandaged copy of John Sinclair’s dual-language edition of Dante’s Inferno, and specifically two lines within it from Canto V. This is the Canto depicting the first circle of Hell where Francesca and her lover Paolo swirl forever in the storms of adulterous passion. But where, during a brief calming of the wind, Francesca is able to explain, at Dante’s request, what led to Paolo’s and her damnation: their mutual attraction to a medieval rom-com text penned by Galeotto about Sir Lancelot’s adulterous trysting with Queen Guinevere. They read it hungrily together, their heads getting closer and closer until a fateful kiss ensues, then still more kisses and whatnot after that, leading afterwards to their murder by Francesca’s aggrieved husband, Giovanni Malatesta. The villain in the affair is the lovers’ go-between, Galeotto. But according to Dante, the snake in the garden was actually the book itself:

Galeotto fu il libro e qui lo scrisse
Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante.

Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it.
We read no more that day.

Stop! Have my metaphors of disaster have gone too far? Just because books are piled up precariously doesn’t mean they’re inherently deadly, does it?

No, clearly not, and of course I’m being facetious by pretending they are. But then again, books prompt powerful acts of persuasion, acts that come alive only when read and responded to. So everything about them depends on how their words are received and reimagined. This transmission from the mind of the author to the mind of the reader is never without peril.

So it’s with some relief that I’ll soon have them all safely re-filed in our living room. Except, of course, for the one I’m choosing to be my companion for the evening. And which will it be? Well, why not Thoreau? Let me see, where did I leave off? The post-it marks a spot in page 21:

Shad are still taken in the basin of the Concord River at Lowell, where they are said to be a month earlier than the Merrimack shad, on account of the warmth of the water.

Hmm. A fine sentence, I suppose, but I’ll be asleep too soon if I read much more. Yet, after all, it’s Thoreau. I’ll keep going just a little bit longer and then just quietly drift away with the tide. Yes, I’ll follow the shad a little further:

…Still patiently, almost pathetically, with instinct not to be discouraged, not to be reasoned with, revisiting their old haunts, as if their stern fates would relent, and still met by the Corporation and its dam! Poor shad! Where is thy redress?…

And on and on in this wonderfully mock-heroic vein about the tragically abused shad. Help! My imagination has been called from its slumber. The narrator isn’t talking about fish. He’s talking about me and my own arguments with destiny. I’m helplessly hooked again.

After getting his PhD in English literature, George Dardess taught close reading to his own students until his retirement. Since then he has been ordained a Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and written several books on Muslim-Christian relations. He has also created the graphic novel Foreign Exchange.