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On Owing a Library Book
I knew I owed one book. A book I’d checked out of a library near Boston two years ago. I could not remember the title. I have hundreds of books on my shelves. Only one of them was not mine.
If I could go back in time to speak to my younger self who checked out this book, I’d tell him what I learned from it.
Some suitcases, flights, and emails later, there it was, the overdue library book, revealed to me at last: the right book on the wrong continent. I’d taken it with me along with many of my other books, moved it far from its home. The library seemed to sense its migration, was still pinging me by email.
The Importance Of What We Care About by the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt. A collection of essays, half of which he wrote before I was born, the other half of which he wrote when I was a child.
In my poem “Ladder” in my collection Wild Mushrooms, I’d once written:
“Imagine that, some day, every book
you ever borrowed will come due.
There will not be a quiz,
but a kind of test.”
It is finally time for me to read Prof. Frankfurt’s book. It’s challenging. He cares about a lot of abstract philosophical matters. He wrote these essays as standalones, not as chapters of a unified book, but eventually he decided that their themes were close enough for him to bind the essays…
