I thought about it for some time and recalled a brilliant little essay I once read by Walter Benjamin, a philosopher, social and literary critic, and renowned bibliophile occasionally associated with the Frankfurt School of literary theory.  “Unpacking My Library” represents Benjamin’s reflection on his own personal collection as he catalogued it in a new abode.  (Because he was Jewish, Benjamin found himself running from the Nazis, moving first to Paris, then to Switzerland, then to Spain where he ultimately committed suicide.)  He speaks of the “thrill of acquisition” and the collector’s concern for each book’s fate, as opposed to its “functional, utilitarian value.”  The book’s fate brings an additional element to its ownership, superseding anything one experiences when purchasing a new book.  That is, all of the relevant facts about that used book contribute to its essence, which the owner values or ought to value: its history, publisher, message, binding, illustrations, craftsmanship, and of course, its previous owner.  “As he holds them in his hands, he seems to be seeing through them into their distant past as though inspired.”  Thus, just as individual works have their own fates, individual copies of such works also have their own fates—a key distinction to the used collector.

Benjamin’s theory of used book acquisition indicates that purchasing such books is a rebirth or renaissance for the individual copy (not necessarily the text, for the text lives on indefinitely).  Renewal of the old world contains a childlike element in that children are always renaming, reconfiguring, recreating, and reviving old things.  The same is true of the collector, and that is why renewing the old world “is the collector’s desire when he is driven to acquire new things.”

Non-collectors may criticize: “Have you read all these books? Will you ever have time to read them all?”  Benjamin notes ironically that failure to read these books is characteristic of collectors.  Indeed, one would not have a library, properly called, if one did not have unread books.  Benjamin notes that he once tried purchasing only books he read, with deleterious consequences to his library: “This was its militant age, when no book was allowed to enter it without the certification that I had read it.  Thus, I might never have acquired a library extensive enough to be worthy of the name if there had not been an inflation.”  Hence, in some cases, the collector may intend never to read the book—only to rescue it “because he found it lonely” and in need of freedom.  “To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.”  My personal collection includes some wonderful volumes from various trips, too, many of which I have not read.  Nonetheless, they serve as a constant reminder of images and memories of cities I enjoyed.  Further, I believe firmly that cities reveal an important part of themselves in secondhand shops of all kinds, whether selling books or antiques, for example.

In summation, the intimate relationship between collector and his personal collection is of the most important kind.  Although public collections are more useful than private collections, the intimate bond between book and owner esteems the objects with their proper due in the latter, something critically absent from the former.  Perhaps, this is why I was so giddy when I returned from the used bookshop and placed my new acquisitions on my bookshelf: I was esteeming my purchases with the intimate relationship of ownership, given their previous fates and all this entails.

(All quotations from Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. London: Pimlico, 1999.)

• Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
• The Halo Effect, by Phil Rosenzweig

You can find Kahneman’s book on Amazon or in most bookstores. You can find Rosenzweig’s book in used bookstores, Amazon marketplace, Alibris.com, Abebooks.com or Bookfinder.com. With shipping, it will cost you about $6, which will be the best $6 you spend all year. Get them both, and read them.

The story focuses on Joe Cobden, a bastard child, hunchback and half-Indian, who lived most of his life in Kansas in the second half of the 19^th century. As you may have guessed, being a bastard, hunchback and half-Indian made you few friends in the West at that time. Joe’s life unfolds with bountiful heartbreak, loneliness, and disappointment. And yet, I found Joe a character of great sympathy, and at times high character.

Matthews tells the story of Joe, and the other protagonists around Valley Forge, Kansas (a fictional place), with a mixture of unforgiving harshness and almost-Greek perspective on tragedy. Crime, sin and misfortune abound, and at times shock the reader – robbery; prostitution; repeated incest; suicide; masturbation with a corpse for inspiration; child abandonment; and greed.

Nearly every character possesses a major flaw or psychosis. In this sense, Matthews both reflects real life and deviates from it. Everyone does indeed have their own flaws, quirks and commits their own sins. But to depict nearly every person as having a major and disgusting propensity for profound sin exaggerates reality, in my experience. Through his treatment of the characters, Matthews reveals a dark and unflattering side of human nature, but tinged with ennobling nuance as well. Joe had no moral obligation to remain at the ridge caring for Calvin and Noah after Alma’s abandonment, save self-imposed moral obligation. This nuance differentiates Matthews’ achievement from other Western authors, notably Louis L’Amour and Cormac McCarthy, who in their own ways portray man in essentially Manichean terms.

I found this examination of the emotional, mental and moral dimensions of the Old West the most fascinating aspect of the book. I loved Lonesome Dove because it so beautifully revealed the Old West in terms of external action. We saw a cattle drive, battles with Indians, death and growth. The external action in Heart of the Country essentially ends less than halfway through the book. Instead, it bares open the internal action of the men and women of the Old West. Matthews tells us what each character thinks, feels and sees; we witness and even experience their terrible conflicts, outrage, courage, disappointment and pettiness.

That internal action makes for an outstanding book, and a treasured gift.

The small size allows easy carrying, in a coat or pants pocket, or in a travel bag. I almost always carry mine with a pen clipped to the cover:

Each Memo Book has 48 pages, which takes me 10-20 days to go through. Given their appropriately sturdy construction, they hold up well across that time. To date, I’ve numbered my books (#1, now at #11) for easy retrieval, if needed. At the pace I go through them, the numbering could get high relatively quickly, so I may switch to a calendar based system, e.g., 2012-1; 2012-2, etc.

I’ve become a bit of an addict. Starting with the regular Memo Books, I’ve bought the last three special editions (American Tradesman; Fire Spotter; Northerly), plus a few of their County Fair books.  The Tradesman and Fire Spotter editions were inspired; I really enjoy using them. The glossy white cover on the Northerly (pictured above) doesn’t strike my fancy as much. It feels odd on my fingers. Last month, I broke down and subscribed to COLORS, and I eagerly await the announcement of the season’s edition, followed by even greater anticipation of them showing up in my mailbox. As a result, I have about 30 books in reserve, and just ordered The Kit, when the company offered an extra 3-pack with any order placed last Thursday-Friday.

In addition, I use an original Memo Book as my fly fishing journal:

The only suggestions for improving the Memo Books:

• On the inside back cover, they include information on the books, the ink, paper and so on. They also include a list of “Practical Applications” for the book which are often humorous. Regardless, I’d like to use that space. Or, including useful information, like on the inside covers of the Steno Pad, would also help.
• The dot matrix is my favorite paper. Field Notes guys and gals — please make that a permanent edition option.
• A pocket in the inside back cover would be useful. Before finding Field Notes Brand, I used a couple Behance Action Cahier books, and found the pocket surprisingly useful.

At one point I bought the Field Notes Road Trip Kit, which included a Steno Pad. Now, I haven’t used a steno book in years, and didn’t expect to use this one. But, I’ve found it very nice to use as a light notebook when I need something more than a Memo Book — in meetings or to sketch charts. The front and back covers are extra-sturdy, which makes for a stable writing surface. And, as noted, the covers contain helpful information, facts and tidbits.

In short, these are fantastic note books for everyday, all-day use. I carry one with me almost everywhere I go — even walking the dog, in case an idea strikes me. Plus, as you’ll see when you check out the website, the Field Notes team brings a huge level of passion to what they do, and a smart, appealing marketing touch — both of which I admire in companies, and want to reward with my business. They’ve earned it and I plan to use their products for years to come.

Morgan especially calls forth Boone the hunter; Boone loving the solitude of the forest; Boone with a contradictory legacy as a trailblazer, but an unwitting destroyer of much that he loved; Boone the man unable to manage business affairs and finances; Boone the respecter of Indians and their cultures; and perhaps most of all, Boone the man of peace in a world continually by war.

Some of my favorite quotes:

“It is an odd fact that those who accomplish the most often spend years fumbling and stumbling to find what it is they can achieve. The first half of a life may be given to experiment, trial and error, failure after failure.”

“There is no more important milestone in a man’s life than the death of his father.”

“In his midthirties a man either reaches out toward risk and glory or stays within the routines of the expected and ordinary.”

“Two years may be the time it takes to leave behind one’s old self and see the world in a larger, clearer way.”

I’m glad my uncle made this recommendation. Morgan has made a fine contribution to American biography, and to the philosophy of a life well-lived.

I surmise that one reason public intellectuals of the past—here I have in mind, to name just a few, Albert Einstein, Madame Curie, John Maynard Keynes, Norman Mailer, Reinhold Niebuhr, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Gore Vidal—maintained their prominence in political and social commentary was their ability to entertain big ideas and offer trenchant insight into American society, for which the American public at the time had an appetite, and nearly always in a way that was accessible to the average citizen.  Their ideas were by no means pleasing and often critical; nevertheless, Americans read them, entertained them, and ruminated them.

“Ideas just aren’t what they used to be.  Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world,” posits Neal Gabler in a fascinating piece in last month’s New York Times Sunday Review.  “If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it is not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just do not care as much about ideas as they did.  In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world—a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that cannot instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding.  Bold ideas are almost passé.”

Occasionally, late-night talk shows would invite intellectuals like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr. on their programs to discuss current events.  Alas, those are bygone days in American history! “There is the eclipse of the public intellectual in the general media by the pundit who substitutes outrageousness for thoughtfulness, and the concomitant decline of the essay in general-interest magazines.  And there is the rise of an increasingly visual culture, especially among the young—a form in which ideas are more difficult to express.”

Garber contends that we live in an environment beyond Post-Enlightenment, where thinking no longer employs the techniques of rational thought—namely, that of the post-idea world.  The post-idea world is one where most people do not think at all, regardless of the mode of inquiry.  Indeed, it seems ironic but in the age of information, where man has the ability to know nearly anything, with heretofore the greatest ease, humans are thinking about ideas less and less.  (Perhaps, the greatest irony is how thought-provoking Garber’s article itself is.)

“In the past, we collected information not simply to know things.  That was only the beginning.  We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful—into ideas that made sense of the information.  We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas.”  Here, Garber is spot-on, though perhaps he does not explicate fully the implications for the public intellectual.  Great ideas explain the world to us, and public intellectuals entertain great ideas, packaging them neatly for American readers, and making them accessible for most everybody.  They were imperative to answering the writhing questions of our human existence.

Hence, information competes with ideas, pushing ideas to the background will information overtakes the foreground.  Americans would rather discuss information than big ideas, which are cumbersome, theoretical, or impractical—not to mention less rewarding, both economically and socially.  Although there exist websites dedicated to discussing big ideas, the websites that are most popular—Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Flikr—house information, and hardly the type of information that engenders ideas.  To make matters worse, Garber notes, among American youth these mediums supplant print, wherein ideas generally reside.  “While social networking may enlarge one’s circle and even introduce one to strangers, this is not the same thing as enlarging one’s intellectual universe.  Indeed, the gab of social networking tends to shrink one’s universe to oneself and one’s friends, while thoughts organized in words, whether online or on the page, enlarge one’s focus.”

And so while there may be successors to the aforementioned public intellectuals, they are not likely to receive traction in a culture that values information and facts more than ideas.  Moreover, Americans with good ideas are likely to take their ideas to the marketplace—or at the very least feel pressure to do so.  But there is a difference between entrepreneurialism and inventions (i.e., material) and intellectually stimulating thoughts (i.e., ideational).  Lastly, one may also view the cultural traction (or lack thereof) of contemporary big ideas, with specific reference to a book that sounded a powerful tocsin against anti-intellectualism in America—Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind.  Today, one may suspect that Bloom’s magnum opus, which topped the New York Times best-seller list in its day, would barely make a ripple.

After Levi survived Auschwitz and made the long journey back to Turin (ultimately settling for the rest of his life near his childhood home), he retained a deep knowledge of chemistry, but turned to the field of writing—partly as a cathartic exercise, partly because of his ‘obligation to bear witness’ to the secreted world of the Nazi concentrationary camps.

The last of Levi’s books before his unexpected suicide in 1987, The Drowned and the Saved represents his best attempt to analyze nearly every aspect of the Nazi concentrationary system.  It consists of a series of essays on, among other things: the nature of human memory (generally, and regarding Levi’s time in the Lager); ‘the grey zone’ of power dynamics inside the system; the polyglot that was the jail and the difficulties of communicating; the violence done to the German language under Nazism (for it was no longer the melodious, beautiful language of Schiller, Hegel, or Goethe); the eternal feeling of guilt that survivors experienced merely for surviving; the existence of useless violence inside the camps; whether intellectuals, more attuned to the constant shame of the system, suffered more than their less gifted colleagues; stereotypes of survivors that exist because memory of the offense, at the time of writing, was more than forty years old.

Throughout the book, Levi reiterates a shuddering truth: the salvati, or survivors, “are not the true witnesses.”  It is the sommersi, the submerged or drowned, whose lives are the ultimate testimony to the terrible truth—to wit, annihilation and the Final Solution.  Survivors “speak in their stead, by proxy,” says Levi, but he could not help but think that the best died in the gas chambers (as well as the full truth).  Nevertheless, one gathers in Levi’s writing that Auschwitz provided him maturity—both as a man and as an intellectual—and a raison d’être.  Pure intellectual curiosity drives Levi’s unrelenting questioning.  “Something one cannot understand constitutes a painful void, a puncture, a permanent stimulus that insists on being satisfied.”  Levi speaks of the tutelage of the profound Austrian philosopher Hans Mayer—so alienated from his German-speaking culture that he later changed his name to Jean Amery (a French anagram of Hans Mayer)—far more intellectually mature than Levi was upon his internment at Auschwitz.  Indeed, Levi goes so far as to say that Auschwitz was his university, in some perverse sense.

Levi’s books serve as detailed accounts of the Holocaust—sometimes too explicit—and are not for the faint-of-heart; they recount some of the deepest nightmares of the concentrationary experience, with trenchant analysis of the experience every step of the way.  In fact, the analysis, at times, is so profound that this book is deceptively long, albeit only 170 pages.  One cannot help but read 10 pages and wonder in awe at the depth of Levi’s ruminations.  Moreover, perhaps no author in recent memory sent me to the Oxford English Dictionary faster than Primo Levi (even in translation).  However, Levi’s vocabulary is never turgid or highfalutin.  He incorporates rich word usage but honors syntax and subtlety, redolent of William F. Buckley, Jr.

Levi’s work cuts to the heart of what it means to be human—what we value; the nature of political propaganda; our natural pain threshold; the culpability of bystanders to a crime; the role of suffering in moral and personal development.  Levi states that his work attempts to offer “explicit recipes for being human,” a goal he achieves through his hard-won wisdom and searing insight.