Paradise is filled with Books

Yesterday evening I stepped into QB World at Jalan Sunda and came out with three books. The only way I can prevent myself from buying more books is to refrain from stepping into a bookstore at all. I am such a hopeless bibliophile that I'd buy books just for the sake of keeping them, even books that I know I'll never read - not in the foreseable future anyway - but are good acquisitions for my library. Some women can't stop buying shoes, I can't stop buying books.

These days I'd rather call myself a book collector rather than a reader because the rate of my reading cannot catch up with the rate at which my library is growing. Just here in my hotel room, at last count, there are about 47 books stacked on my desk: They range from Modern Sundanese Poetry to The Guru Guide to the Knowledge Economy by Joseph and Jimmie Boyet.

Some people treat books as disposables - worthless after you have read them. Good books - and that covers a major portion of the books that I own - are not merely a medium for the conveyance of information like newspapers, but are capsules of experience. I've never believed in renting or borrowing books from the library. Books that I have read, I must own. They become a part of my life - my extended memory.

I take comfort in the fact that at least I'm not as crazy a bibliophile as people who collect first editions, book jackets or annotated copies by the authors themselves. A Pound of Paper by John Baxter which I've read earlier this year, gives an interesting glimpse into the crazy world of real bibliophiles.

In Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, monks in a Benedictine monastery were willing to kill because of a book. In the movie adaptation of the book by director Jean-Jacques Annaud, the medieval monk-detective, Brother William, played by Sean Connery was portrayed to be a lover of books. In the climatic scene when the monastery is burning, he emerges from the fire clutching, not his fellow monks but books he had managed to save from the monastery's secret library. In another movie, The Ninth Gate, directed by Roman Polanski, which was also based on a book The Club Domas by Arturo Perez-Reverte, John Depp plays an unscrupulous book detective, hired by book collectors to trace rare and priceless books. Nothing beats a movie based on a book, about books.

There is also a scene at the end of of Steven Spielberg's Minority Report which lingers in my mind. The three clairvoyant characters, called Pre-Cogs, who in the movie are used like laboratory rats by a futuristic society to predict crimes before they happen, were in the end freed to lead a normal life. They were shown living in a country house, filled with books, happily spending the rest of their lives reading. That scene to me, is how I would imagine paradise to be like.