I was going to write something about "The Sense of an Ending", one of my favourite books by one of my favourite authors, but then I got waylaid by the description of one of his other books, "Levels of Life", and I thought that's just the sort of book I want to read now.
I went to ebay and found a copy priced at a modest twelve dollars but then, with my finger poised on the "BuyItNow" button, I thought, "Just a tick! I have several of Julian Barnes' books, why not this?" And so, at five o'clock in the morning, with the smoke from the neighbours' woodfires in my nostrils and before I had fed myself or the ducks and the possum, I trudged through the dewy grass across to my library to see if I did.
YES! I GOT IT! It's just that I hadn't read it yet! Some of my visitors look at my library and go, "Wow! What a library you have! Have you read them all?", and others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool.
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. A library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the size of your house allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. I call this collection of unread books my antilibrary.
"Levels of Life" is part history, part fiction, and part memoir. It is a powerfully personal book on the subject of grief. It opens in the nineteenth century with balloonists, photographers, and Sarah Bernhardt, whose adventures lead seamlessly into an entirely personal account of the author's own great loss. "You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed..."
As will be yours after you've read this slim 118-page volume. I'm almost through to the last page, after which I may read it again, after which I'll return it to my library, the read-book-part of it, not my antilibrary.
As for "The Sense of an Ending", I'll tell you about it some other time, perhaps after I've had my porridge and fed the ducks and the possum.
