Library of America

Sometime ago—last year, after the advent of Covid—we cancelled our long-time subscription to the Library of America.

We’d been subscribers for many years (since its beginning really)—one slipcased volume a month—of classic works in American literature. There are volumes there that you would certainly expect—volumes by Poe, Jack London (!), Philip Roth—and there are others that are ... surprising. (I’ll not mention them—don’t want to offend anyone!)

Anyway, we bought them all. And I read quite a few of them—or used them to check details for something I was writing. Some were books I’d meant to read for a long time—e.g., Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales. Others were books I didn’t own in any other format—books by Twain, Crane (a rhyme!), Melville, Faulkner, and others.

Fiction, nonfiction, poetry—they’re all there, and still accumulating in other folks’ homes, a volume a month. 

They feature a chronology of the author’s life (a detailed one), endnotes, and the like. Very useful.

But, as I said, about a year ago, we resigned our membership. I was not doing well medically, and I just wasn’t sure how much more I could read.

We also gave up a lot of magazine subscriptions we’d had for a long, long time (I think I posted earlier about this)—Atlantic, Harper’s, New York Review of Books, and numerous others. We also converted our newspaper subscriptions to digital editions. Things were piling up, you see, and I wasn’t reading them. I just didn’t have the energy to do more than I was doing.

That’s something I never understood as a young man—how things ... slip away later on. You have a grip on your life—and then you don’t. It seems you look away for a brief moment—and when you look back again, the world has changed. You have a wife, a son, a daughter-in-law, two grandsons. Many of your relatives, friends, classmates, and even former students are gone.

I startled myself the other day when I posted a picture of a family gathering back in 1957—and only my two brothers and I remain. Gone are our parents, my aunt and uncle, their daughter, my great-grandfather—even the family dog.

And I find myself shuffling down the hall with a walker and sleeping half the day. Visiting doctors more than anyone else.

We no longer go to the movies (we spent years of going once or twice a week)—play productions (we attended frequently)—concerts—restaurants with friends and family. 

Instead, I sit here typing sad words onto a glowing page, words which I will soon send off into an invisible sphere that didn’t exist until I was very near retirement.

I feel more and more like Rip Van Winkle, waking up each day, discovering my dog is gone—as is the life I had been certain was permanent.