Moon Palace Read Online Free PDF Page B

That was precisely how the books had entered the boxes. If nothing else, the chronology was intact, the sequence had been preserved by default. I considered this to be an ideal arrangement. Each time I opened a box, I was able to enter another segment of my uncle’s life, a fixed period of days or weeks or months, and it consoled me to feel that I was occupying the same mental space that Victor had once occupied—reading the same words, living in the same stories, perhaps thinking the same thoughts. It was almost like following the route of an explorer from long ago, duplicating his steps as he thrashed out into virgin territory, moving westward with the sun, pursuing the light until it was finally extinguished. Because the boxes were not numbered or labeled, I had no way of knowing in advance which period I was about to enter. The journey was therefore made up of discrete, discontinuous jaunts. Boston to Lenox, for example. Minneapolis to Sioux Falls. Kenosha to Salt Lake City. It didn’t matter to me that I was forced to jump around the map. By the end, all the blanks would be filled in, all the distances would be covered.
    I had read many of the books before, and still others had been read out loud to me by Victor himself: Robinson Crusoe, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man. I did not let that stand in my way, however. I plowed through everything with equal passion, devouring old works as hungrily as new. Piles of finished books rose in the corners of my room, and whenever one of these towers seemed in danger of falling, I would load up two shopping bags with the threatened volumes and take them along with me on my next visit to Columbia. Directly across from the campus on Broadway was Chandler’s Bookstore, a cramped and dusty rathole that did a brisk trade in used books. Between the summer of 1967 and the summer of 1969 I made dozens of appearances there, and littleby little I divested myself of my inheritance. That was the one action I allowed myself—making use of what I already owned. I found it wrenching to part with Uncle Victor’s former possessions, but at the same time I knew that he would not have held it against me. I had somehow discharged my debt to him by reading the books, and now that I was so short of money, it seemed only logical that I should take the next step and convert the books into cash.
    The problem was that I couldn’t earn enough. Chandler drove hard bargains, and his understanding of books was so different from mine that I barely knew what to say to him. For me, books were not the containers of words so much as the words themselves, and the value of a given book was determined by its spiritual quality rather than its physical condition. A dog-eared Homer was worth more than a spanking Virgil, for example; three volumes of Descartes were worth less than one by Pascal. Those were essential distinctions for me, but for Chandler they did not exist. A book was no more than an object to him, a thing that belonged to the world of things, and as such it was not radically different from a shoebox, a toilet plunger, or a coffeepot. Each time I brought in another portion of Uncle Victor’s library, the old man would go into his routine. Fingering the books with contempt, perusing the spines, hunting for marks and blemishes, he never failed to give the impression of someone handling a pile of filth. That was how the game worked. By degrading the goods, Chandler could offer rock-bottom prices. After thirty years of practice, he had the pose down pat, a repertoire of mutterings and asides, of wincings, tongue-clicks, and sad shakes of the head. The act was designed to make me feel the worthlessness of my own judgment, to shame me into recognizing the audacity of having presented these books to him in the first place. Are you telling me you want money for these things? Do you expect money from the garbage man when he carts away your trash?
    I knew that I was being cheated, but I seldom