The Volume Library 1976

The Volume Library 1976

Sometime in the 1970s, my mother bought a copy of The Volume Library from a door-to-door salesman.

For nearly the next decade, that enormous book was one of my primary sources of information. Long before I could type a question into a computer and have an answer appear in seconds, if I needed to know something for school, I went to The Volume Library.

I used it for book reports. I used it for homework. I used it simply because I wanted to know things.

What I remember most clearly was its wonderful material on mythology and literature. I returned to those sections over and over again. Greek and Roman mythology, writers, stories, characters, history—the book provided a map of a world that seemed almost impossibly large to me then.

I didn't realize it at the time, of course, but much of what I learned from those pages became permanent. That old reference book still comprises part of the backbone of what I know about mythology and literature.

There is something difficult to explain now about growing up with a book like that in the house. Information had a physical location. If you wanted to know about mythology, you didn't search for mythology. You went to the shelf. You pulled down the enormous book. You found the section. And then, inevitably, while looking for the thing you wanted, you found three other things you hadn't known you wanted to know.

Years passed, and the copy we had in our house disappeared somewhere along the way.

Eventually I went looking for it again.

I found a copy on eBay—not the actual book from my childhood, but the same edition, The Volume Library from 1976. I bought it.

It's on my bookshelf now.

I suppose that's one advantage of getting older. Every once in a while, you get the chance to buy back a small piece of the world that made you.

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Powering Out of the Funk

Powering out of the funk for the first time in weeks for some reason this is happening at three a.m. but it's been so oppressive I'm not going to question it. I wanted to say getting a chance to study absurd plays like The Balcony by Jean Genet with Michael Quinn eventually gives one some balance and grounding to find one's feet when absurd things like what we've all just witnessed happen. In one semester I read Ionescu and Beckett and Genet and got a chance to spend hours discussing them with a man who knew his stuff. All these years later it helps me find my bearings at three a.m. and soon it will help me sleep the coma sleep of an existentialist who knows these things come, these things go.

Knowing that people have been dealing with the absurdity of the human condition and writing about it from the beginning helps one put crazy times and events in perspective. Waves of insanity come, they go. When they come it always feels at first as if this is the first time this has ever happened, but except for the first time it ever happened it never is. Take some comfort in reading how the Greeks, the French, the Romans, and every culture that ever existed dealt with it. Sometimes a sense of humor is essential. Sure, it's not funny that a lot of people are probably going to get hurt because of the miscalculation many have made in either voting for Donald Trump, or not encouraging others not to, but we'll get through it. We always have. Pin It