Shelving and Sorting

{Photo by rocketlass.}

In Luis Fernando Verissimo's witty and playful little novel Borges and the Eternal Orangutans, the cloistered, not necessarily reliable protagonist, whose life has been "spent among books," explains his status as a single man like this:

It didn't take much persuasion to keep me single. I had always thought of a permanent domestic commitment to any woman other than Aunt Raquel as an intellectual threat. Not that another woman would steal my soul, but she would fatally interfere with the organisation of my books, for which Aunt Raquel had a reverential respect that she had transmitted to a long line of terrified cleaning ladies. The "young master's books" were not to be touched, wherever they were in our small Bonfim apartment, and the shelf containing my editions of Borges was a kind of reliquary which, if profaned, could cost them their hands.

I think that's taking one's organizational schemes a bit too far.

Later in the novel, in Borges's library--which the narrator is surprised to find less organized than he'd expected, with piles of books on the floor--the master relates a tale that implicitly argues for the pleasures of a bit of disorder:

You told how in the King of Bohemia's fantastical library they resorted to coincidence in their attempts to evoke the spiritual language that circulated in the spheres and in dreams and that sought expression and significance in words, in vowels and consonants. With eyes closed, they would remove a book from the shelves, open it at random, choose a line, and then immediately copy this down. The process was repeated until they had a reasonably coherent paragraph or one that was promisingly incoherent and open to interpretation.

Which, of course, sends me to my shelves:

Never settle in a city where there aren't Jews: the food will be terrible and there'll be no culture. "What's the next move," asked Bunce, the pot-bellied dwarf. (This claim is anyway partly borne out by the standard dictionary of Ancient Egyptian.) Or there, about thirty-five feet in the air, I was in love with a girl who read my fortune in my hand and infuriated me by predicting that I would be the least important of the three great loves of her life. The houses have that peculiarly wintry aspect now on the west side, being all plastered over with snow adhering to the clapboards and half concealing the doors and windows. Perhaps in a broken, nocturnal, past-haunted city of solitary wanderers and lunatic leagues, like this one, such universal fantasies and the fellowship they provide are no longer possible.

For the sake of those who prefer their sortes IBRL unexplicated, I've hidden the citations here. I claim no predictive quality--except, that is, for melancholic, solitary wanderers and members of lunatic leagues who've been disappointed in love.

And, pray tell, what do your shelves have to say?