Some Dead Things

Many people like to collect old things — myself included. I’ve never gone out of my way to collect anything, but my family has a lot of very old books that I love dearly. The ones whose pages release a faint must when you open them, whose paper has yellowed to the point where flakes crumble off — they really do seem to hold something like a soul inside, and every time I leaf through them I feel as if I’m reading across time itself.

An issue of City Pictorial once introduced Dominguez’s The Paper House, in which there’s a character obsessed with books, who believes that old books should only be read by candlelight, since they were born before electric lighting existed. That image gave me a long, wistful daydream, and I envied it for quite a while — though books like that are genuinely hard to find today. Thinking back, the only time I ever used a candle was when I was very small, and it had nothing to do with books or words.

I also remember, lying under the covers, masturbating by the light of my phone, the pale glow slipping between my fingers and across my thighs, watching the flesh slowly redden. Under that kind of light, the whole body looks different — a feeling quite unlike any other.

Think about it: for most readers it’s genuinely hard to tell whether they’re captivated by the book itself, or by the atmosphere surrounding it. Reading with “a house of gold” and “a face like jade” in mind is probably the real goal of us ordinary mortals. It’s the same logic as someone falling in love in order to strip away the other person’s modesty, or a worshipper rushing to the temple only when disaster strikes.

What I want to say is this: once everything we once called “the ordinary” turns into a fragment of lost brilliance, what could possibly remain to forever wrap it in its old splendor?