Membrowpascualjr

When I was growing up, I would often go to my grandfather’s study room and stand on one of the sofas to reach and pull aside the sliding glass of a three level hanging shelf. Inside, my grandfather kept his treasured books, which included 32 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and 52 volumes of the Great Books of the Western World.

Up until the age of twelve, I turned to the Encylopaedia Britannica merely for reference. But I knew they were special. They were unlike the brightly colored and illustrated books I read in school or those that my father bought for me. Because it wasted no time enticing me, I suspected that the dark brown leather-bound covers compiled something more important inside. And yet as I turned its light pages, it was the curious child in me that tracked down information through alphabetized indexes, the uninitiated mind perpetually on the verge of new discoveries. Each time I would reach out to pull a volume, I grew taller. I carried its immense weight with a mixed sense of pride and a vague melancholic feeling that I would no longer be the same when I put them back on the shelf: I will be transformed. I will no longer be ordinary. I will carry secrets inside me. I will have powers no one will know about. Knowledge will be my refuge, my armour and my weapon when the world turns itself against me.

Meanwhile, the other set, the Great Books, mysteriously beckoned. It was as handy as the books I read in school but when I opened them and turned the pages, I was floored. The consistently small font sizes, the narrow leading and the rigid two-column layout from cover to cover, from the first volume to the last, gave me early on an idea of what my grandmother meant whenever she complained of an attack of vertigo. It had no pictures. The arrogant layout raised an eyebrow. I tried so hard to read them but the letters grew smaller and shrunk to microscopic proportions until entire pages were reduced to blurry lines.

There is no catalyst more powerful in liberating the mind than an early tragedy, the ones that put a premature end to childhood. The year I turned thirteen and my family lost the political power we held over our town for more than half a century, the year my father killed a man and disappeared, the year my uncle was killed in front of his children and turned us into a family on the run, the year my heroes fell, was the year the world pushed me to walk on a path littered with broken glass. I was even too young to articulate the questions that hounded me. I just wanted everything back as they were. And knowing that it would never be, my instincts demanded that I increase my capacity to understand and accept all the events that had taken place. Like a bird on its first flight, it had to trust the invisible wind.

I returned to the Great Books.

The Great Books were color-coded: Blue for History, Politics, Economics and Ethics, from Plutarch to Marx; Red for Philosophy and Religion, from Plato to Pascal; Grey for Mathematics and Natural Sciences, from Euclid to Freud; and Green for Novels, Short Stories, Plays and Poetry.

Blue bored me. Red exasperated me. Grey, I totally abhorred and avoided.

But Green! I turned the pages of the Green coded books with the reverence of an acolyte entering the sacred temple of literature. Even when the passages reached incredible levels of indecipherability, I labored through each obscure word. The Great Minds claimed me as if I almost sensed salvation in the imagined story.

While my high school classmates grappled with Algebra and Trigonometry, I wrestled with the archaic language of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I tortured myself to get over the first page of Tolstoy’s War and Peace knowing that I had to punish myself with hundreds more. I underlined passages. I wrote marginal notes. In the end, I was rewarded. I stood at the edge of a dark forest in the beginning of Dante’s Divine Comedy and I knew there was no turning back from Inferno to Paradise.

I read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and his complex treatise on evil and goodness and was religiously converted with his stubborn faith on man’s humanity. I read his short story, White Nights, a sad love story about the secret meetings of a woman waiting for her lover and a stranger who kept her company and whose dreams were crushed in a devastating ending that left me weeping for weeks. I read Gogol’s The Overcoat, soared with Shakespeare and in no time, with my mind and heart open like the vast landscape of an unmapped country, I was ready to venture through the Blue books and chart it with my imaginative faculties broadened by minds that I trusted and never betrayed me. I read Sir Francis Bacon’s essays on Truth, Death, Love, Youth and Age (“A man that is young in years, may be old in hours, if he have lost no time”), Parents and Children (“The joys of parents are secret; and so are their griefs and fears. They cannot utter the one; nor they will not utter the other”). From there I began reading the Encyclopaedia Brittanica with greater interest on subjects that fascinated me, mostly biographies such as those of the composer Antonio Salieri, whose life and genius were made richer under the shadows of the more talented Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

One afternoon, my grandmother told me the story of one of my grandfather’s youngest brother, the other writer in the family who also locked himself in his room and read a lot. He lost his mind and was often heard rambling discourses with himself. He died at the age of sixteen, his legs mysteriously covered with sores, as if he had just completed a terrible journey on foot. After his death, his father burned all his books and cautioned his other children to be guarded on their reading habits. After hearing this story, I became very depressed. With no friends to turn to, I ended up seeking solace once more from the books. I pulled an Encylopaedia Brittanica volume and read the biography of Arthur Rimbaud, the precocious boy-poet of French symbolism who died at the age of nineteen after his legs were amputated.

After reading Rimbaud's biography, I returned the book to the shelf and walked to my grandfather’s bedroom to rest. Everyone was asleep. To reach my grandfather’s bedroom, one had to pass through a tiny bedroom where in the old days, armed men kept guard (my grandfather was the town mayor). Right beside the door that led to my grandfather’s bedroom was a wall mirror where I caught my own reflection. I stopped and slowly walked towards it. Only then did I realized that I had not taken a shower for days. I had been wearing the same clothes, my grandfather’s maroon knitted sweater and my father’s green and white striped pajamas. Why was I wearing them? I looked closer to examine my face as if I was trying to recognize a stranger’s face. I raised my hand to touch my face and it frightened me how I slowly moved like a tired old man. Tracing the premature lines on my face, I was conscious of a thousand lifetimes passing. I have aged, I told myself. The souls of those who have departed and the great minds I have read have added years to my youth.

There were other books on the shelf including the Brittanica Yearbooks I never read and a huge white leather bound Bible. The biggest books consisted of a three-volume dictionary. There was another Encylopaedia set of discourses on art and politics where I read about the Marshall Plan and the United States’ covert plan to crush communism. There was also a cheaper Encyclopaedia set in white leather binding. It had thicker paper and colored pictures, but they weren’t as informative as the Brittanica.

I would like to see these books again, the same volumes that kept me company when I cocooned myself. I want to reread the notes I have written, the passages I have underlined years ago and be enlightened on what it was that left indelible imprints in my deepest subconscious and turned me into the person that I am now, my thoughts and actions forever marked by the printed word. But really, I’m not sure. I know for one that the books are no longer complete. A couple of volumes are missing. I know this because I took them with me whenever I ran away from home and lost them. I remember passing on the volume of Dostoevsky’s White Nights to a cousin who like me, fell in love with the story. She passed it on to another relative. I am not sure if it is still with her.

One day my father called me to the office. He was with an uncle and an aunt. The couple wanted to borrow some books and my father upon checking, found that some volumes were missing. My father hurled painful words at me that I have since blocked out from my memory, solid words that humiliated and crushed me. I do remember standing in front of them and staring at the floor. I told him that I no longer remember where I left them. I was stuttering. When I looked up, I couldn’t even look at my father. I looked at my uncle and my aunt. They looked away.

Much, much later after my grandfather and father had died, I found the certificate of ownership of my grandfather’s collection of books together with a wall map of the world and showed this to my grandmother. Those are very, very expensive, she said. It took us years to pay them. They can never be replaced. My grandfather’s collection was a rare edition now out of print. The latest edition, revised in 1990 has added three more volumes to the Great Books. Of the original 130 authors that were included in my grandfather’s edition, sixty more from the 20th century were added. The entire set now costs a thousand dollars. The 2002 thirty-two volume Encyclopaedia Brittanica set, whose production heritage date back more than two hundred years ago, now costs US$ 1,400. With interactive CD ROM versions of these books now available, I wonder if people still buy them.

Long before we moved into my grandfather’s house where I first set eyes on my grandfather’s collection of books, my father and I sat one morning on the red abaca carpet of our living room in our old apartment. In front of us were huge white carton boxes. He opened them and took out a complete set of Walt Disney’s twenty-volume, 1971 first edition of the Wonderful World of Knowledge and the complete collection of Dr Seuss’ books. My parents claim that I started reading at the age of three and was reading newspapers before I entered kindergarten. It could be true, otherwise I wouldn’t have any memory of reading the books my father bought me that day and these all happened before I went to school. When I tell people that my mother used to be a teacher they easily assume that it was she who influenced my reading habits. The truth is, it was my father. I remember my father and I reading together Dr. Seuss’ Mister Brown Can Moo, Can You? and I would give anything to hear my father moo again. My favorite was And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street about a boy on his way home from school imagining fantastic stories he would tell his father. I read all the books over and over until the bindings loosened and pages fell off. I reread them when I grew older because of the memory it brought back and what it stood for – the most valuable and lasting legacy of a parent to his child – information, knowledge, wisdom and above all else, love. Years later, my father thinking we have outgrown the books, passed them on to his sister. Even books, I learned a child must part with. And yet I knew of the more important things that my father has given me, those that cannot be taken away.

I am now thirty-five years old and it has been a long time since I left home. The last time I moved to a new apartment my own library filled twenty-five boxes of books. Recently, I went to a Book Fair in Bangkok and found a stall selling used books. On top of one shelf was a set of familiar volumes that made my heart jump: the complete set of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Knowledge. When I pulled out a volume, I realized that it was a much later edition because of the cover illustrations. Still, just by looking at the numbers, I knew by heart its contents. Volume 14 was a collection of fairy tales told by Dopey, Volume 4 was on Transportation by Peg Leg Pete, Volume 2 was by Daisy Duck on Nature and so on. I opened the book and just by looking at the pictures I recognized them without reading their descriptions. I recognized the photo of Trafalgar Square in London, the yellow lichens, and the human anatomy where I first learned what the esophagus was. I bought the books not only because they were second hand and cheap but more importantly, I knew that at one time they had captured a child’s imagination and made him less lonely.

I have stacked the books right next to my bed in memory of my father and the nights he read to me and left me sleeping with the most wonderful dreams.

Writer. Photographer. Grew up in the Philippines. Lived in Thailand for twelve years. Currently in the United States.