When my father was young and poor, he lived by the words of Erasmus: “When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.” He loved to quote these words years later, when he had more than enough to buy food and clothes and books, and to pay off the house where most of those books would make their home.
It was a house that seemed made for books, a roomy red-brick ranch on the corner of a neighborhood full of little Cape Cods. Several walls in the living area are devoted to alcove shelves. More shelves are cut in the wall of the finished basement, which has room for large bookcases in every corner. Still more shelves are bolted into the back of our furnace room.
The upstairs half of the library aspires to orderliness. Behind the couch lives the reference and encyclopedia bookcase. An almost complete Scientific American Library set dominates the top shelf, followed by an assortment of thick resources on physics, history, art, mathematics, philosophy, and horses. Here still lives the giant blue Webster’s dictionary my tiny self used to wrangle into yielding its secrets. Here still lives the complete World Book Encyclopedia set I would browse flopped on my belly for hours, the 1979 set in which Ronald Reagan is forever governor of California. Here too still lives the Complete Sherlock Holmes I raced to finish reading before my ninth birthday, just to say I did.
In the corner to my right is our little “favorite classics on tap” shelf. Tolkien and Lewis live here with A. A. Milne, Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robinson, and Chaim Potok, alongside more obscure family favorites such as Elizabeth Goudge and Albert Payson Terhune. We still have the Macmillan box set of the Narnia chronicles, the ones that make up for their 1970 cover illustrations by being numbered in publication order.
More literary classics spill over into the alcove shelving. Nestled between Dante and T. S. Eliot is my mother’s doctoral dissertation on Spenser’s Faerie Queene, one of her only pieces of literary scholarship before her research interests turned to my father’s specialty, analytic philosophy. Our shelves preserve the archaeological layers of their scholarly pursuits—from epistemology to philosophy of science to philosophy of religion to New Testament studies. One alcove shelf is dedicated to books on evolution and intelligent design. Court battles have been fought over some of the titles here, debating whether it would constitute a “religious” encroachment to assign them for public school science classes. But these debates never affected me, because this library I called home, I also called school.
When I was a child, I became used to awkwardness when strangers found out I was homeschooled. “Oh,” they would say, fumbling for something polite to say. “Do you like that?” I didn’t know what answer they expected, but I always said that I loved it. How could I not? I lived in a house of ten thousand books. Only later would I realize that this was a little strange, that there was something unusual—indeed, many things unusual—about the way I’d been raised. But then Mom and Dad always taught me not to care too much what other people think.
Homeschooling has never enjoyed broad cultural acceptance, and to this day it is associated with ignorance, misplaced religious zeal, and many worse things. Jokes about “unschooling” abound. The stereotype of the weird, miserably stunted homeschooled kid is alive and well. I was mostly protected from this bigotry, growing up with other kids who, like me, wouldn’t have recognized themselves in these jokes.
I will concede in affectionate hindsight that I was an odd child, with quirks that probably would have put me “on the spectrum” had I ever been diagnosed. I also wore my general out-of-touchness like a badge of honor. There were a T.V. and a V.H.S. player in the basement among all the books, but my family never had cable. Vast tracts of pop culture were thus intentionally closed off to me, with the result that almost any piece of media my parents hand-selected instead seemed like the coolest thing ever. This was reflected in my diction, a hyper-precocious melange of archaisms gleaned from old books, throwback slang from Mom and Dad’s youth, and bits of movie and radio dialogue I’d memorized by osmosis.
I was an old soul musically too, falling in love early with Mom and Dad’s church and pop music (especially that one Christian band whose tapes they hoarded in their rebellious youth, because their fundamentalist Bible college teachers thought even this was too edgy). Our classical collection was small but included the essentials. I would listen to Handel’s Messiah front to back, completely spellbound. When I was five or six, I became obsessed with Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, renting them by the armful from the library. Over time, I developed my own musical voice. With my mom and aunt on Dad’s side, I would practice singing the harmony parts for old-time hymns and gospel songs. My skill on an instrument never developed beyond modest competence, though I was proud that after learning piano the traditional way with Mom, I taught myself how to play by ear like Dad, gravitating to the soft rock tunesmiths he loved. Dad’s younger brother, who was classically trained, occasionally appeared like a fairy godfather to shower me with sheet music and avuncular wisdom. I still have a collection of Charlie Brown music from him, a milestone in my lifelong love affair with jazz.
You might correctly infer that I was not a sporty child, though I could play a mean game of chess. Under Dad’s inspired coaching, this was my most intense extracurricular focus and the theme of many shelves, heaving under the weight of classic texts and old magazines from Dad’s collection. My dresser became crowded with trophies, some of which Dad bought himself as he developed our local chess scene, which thrives to this day. The little triumphs and sorrows of my scholastic career loomed large in those days, though what micro-fame I achieved there would eventually be upstaged by my much more accomplished younger sister.
The ideological benefits of homeschooling are obvious, but besides these I’m moved to reflect on this simple freedom of time—time to train my attention on good and beautiful and difficult things, to furnish my mind with them at my own pace. I have sadly lost some of that gift of attention in the digital age. I flip through a decades-old memo pad logging all the books I read in a given year, in between the little to-do lists I would make for an afternoon of reading, chess study, or whatever else nine-year-old me was working on, and I’m filled with envy.
Of all the beautiful things I was given to store away in those years, none was more beautiful than the Anglican liturgy I repeated every Sunday. In this I was a unicorn even among my fellow unicorns. Our running family joke was that we were “high-church Baptists,” a function of the fact that my parents had “gotten liturgy” in their twenties while never completely breaking with their evangelical roots. They wanted to raise me in the Anglican tradition, but an Episcopal church was theologically out of the question. From a demographic analysis, you wouldn’t have thought that Kalamazoo, Michigan, would be the end of their exploring. Yet their search did end here, in a tiny Anglican Catholic parish incongruously planted on the rougher side of town. I was an unbaptized toddler at the time, and the priest was understandably bemused by this Anglophilic yet stubbornly credobaptist couple. But with an already declining congregation, chiefly composed of elderly mainline “refugees,” he couldn’t lightly afford to turn young would-be members away. As a bonus, Mom could play the organ.
And so it was that I, a millennial child in a southwest Michigan college town, improbably became the heir to all the riches of Anglican Christendom. By the time I was confirmed at age seven, I had memorized long passages from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, along with many of the more memorable tunes from the 1940 Protestant Episcopal hymnal. At Christmas, since we had no choir, I served as the “choir boy” who traditionally kicks off the Nine Lessons and Carols with an a cappella first verse of “Once in Royal David’s City.”
At the time, all of this seemed perfectly normal to me, though it would have baffled the evangelicals with whom we built our broader local homeschooling community. Fortunately, I could also speak fluent evangelical, thanks to my parents’ determination that I should inherit the best of their own heritage. Starting when I was eight, Mom began opening our home for regular “hymn sings,” inviting the community to gather and sing the old songs we all loved, which already too many churches were beginning to neglect. For a few years, I joined a local Baptist church program for girls that kept us busy with regular activities, Scripture memory goals, and the like. Evangelical radio programming also played an important formative role, especially children’s drama shows like Adventures in Odyssey.
I would not be the Christian writer I am today without this spiritually bilingual upbringing. Without my Anglican heritage, my ear would never have been trained on the majestic language of Cranmerian liturgy. My sense of beauty would never have been nurtured by the solemn rhythms of the mass, the sacramental hush of Eucharistic consecration. My appreciation of English history and literature would have been less rich. Yet without my evangelical heritage, I wouldn’t have been so steeped in the study of the Word. I wouldn’t have learned to love the unabashedly sentimental revival hymns and gospel songs that so annoy my higher-church peers. I wouldn’t have learned to speak so unselfconsciously about “a personal relationship with Jesus Christ” or devoted myself so diligently to learning how to “give a reason” for the hope that was in me.
Shelves upon shelves of our home library are dedicated just to my father’s vintage apologetics collection, centuries of accumulated scholarship by forgotten names such as James Blunt and Nathaniel Lardner. And alongside Christianity’s most vigorous defenders, you will also find the faith’s most vigorous enemies, from David Hume to D. F. Strauss to Bart Ehrman. I know exactly where to find Dad’s annotated copy of Ehrman’s book Jesus, Interrupted. There’s a key in the front, including bespoke codes like M for “misleading,” B for “bad exegesis,” and A F S for “argument from silence.”
My parents’ own contributions to biblical scholarship are represented on these shelves too, gathered and distilled into four books by my mother. Their research is unapologetically rooted in the work of those forgotten older apologists, making unfashionable arguments great again. This has sometimes come at a heavy social cost, as they’ve been unafraid to criticize contemporary evangelical scholarship which concedes too much to the skeptics. They’ve mounted those criticisms not from a pre-commitment to a fundamentalist framework but from a dedication to following the argument where they believe it actually leads. Studying these debates inoculated me early to the too-common presumption that mainstream respectability is directly correlated with scholarly objectivity.
Looking back, I see this as part of a systematic inoculation to peer pressure of all kinds. My identity was never wrapped up in what my peers were thinking, what they liked, or how they perceived me. One of the healthiest aspects of homeschooling is that you are taught from an early age how to form a friendly bond with anyone who offers you something valuable, regardless of age or status. My parents in particular were always mindful that they came from culturally despised stock, men and women whose godly wisdom would never earn them graduate degrees or elite social capital. However far from those roots their own paths would take them, they would never forget, and they would always give honor to whom honor was due.
I was always drawn to books about heroes. I felt a particular weight in true stories about the ones who have been forgotten. My journal records the day I pulled Whittaker Chambers’s Witness off a basement shelf at age eleven. How moved I was by that story, and how resolved I was to remember it, no matter how that history might be rewritten.
This was the same year my general obsession with military history was blossoming into a particular obsession with World War II. I found a coffee table book of Medal of Honor citations in Barnes & Noble and gave Mom and Dad no peace until I got it for Christmas. I was also inspired by Oliver North’s Fox series War Stories, which had been converted into books with free sample DVDs I watched on repeat. It was then Dad suggested that I conduct my very own oral history project with my next-door neighbor, who was a World War II veteran. He and his wife were among the first owners of the houses on our street, built for couples like them in the post-war boom. I had known them only as the delighted audience for my backyard musical performances. Now that I was growing up a little, I understood the value of what they could give me in return.
Mr. Ippel and I sat down for three sessions together, recorded on cassette tapes. He unlocked memories for me that he had never even shared with his own children: his adventures in Africa and Italy, stories of friends who cracked under pressure, a freak plane accident that took the lives of his best buddies. At one point, recalling the sight of the Statue of Liberty as he was first being shipped out, he asked me to turn the tape off so he could collect himself.
I winced a little when I heard my own voice on those tapes, high-pitched and occasionally too eager to show off some bit of my own knowledge. But how hard can I be on myself, really? I was eleven, and I was preserving a piece of history. These recordings have only become more precious to me as Mr. Ippel’s war slips out of our collective memory. From this young age, already I was being taught what it means to remember, to preserve, to make little monuments in time. I had met heroes in the pages of books, but I knew then that they walked among us still.
I once wrote an essay looking back to that project with Mr. Ippel as the moment I became a journalist. But truthfully, there was no single moment when I knew I would write for a living. For a long time, I thought that I would join the “family business” and become a philosopher. As a child, I would strain and inevitably fail to keep up with the flow whenever Mom and Dad were doing research or mentoring graduate students. One day, I had a melodramatic meltdown about this, and Mom kindly attempted to console me by saying that she thought I would grow up to do something that made me happy, whatever that was.
One of the best gifts my parents gave me was a program that taught me how to type. This trained me to write as an extension of thought, from school projects to chess game annotations to long rambling emails with friends. I wrote as I breathed. I would never have predicted that it would become my livelihood, but I couldn’t imagine life without it. Whatever I loved, I had to write about, and I loved so many things.
I did study philosophy in college, taking several of my dad’s classes at Western Michigan University. Then I took up and eventually abandoned a career path in mathematics. I loved its rigor, but while I paid all the dues to earn a doctorate, discovering along the way that I loved teaching, I knew I just couldn’t hack a research career. I sometimes wonder what my life would look like had I pursued history or literature. But Mom had already seen the rot setting in when she studied literature at Vanderbilt, and she said it would be hard to find a degree program that didn’t suck the joy out of my chosen field. I could take that risk, or I could simply go on reading and learning as I always had. Just love the books, she told me, and teach others to love them. And in my own small way, carry on the writer’s task as described by Joseph Conrad: “to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.”
I sometimes wonder what will become of my family’s ten thousand books. When the time comes, I imagine inviting family and friends to visit the library and take what they want. I imagine the former philosophy students, now with students of their own; the grown-up chess players, hopefully still able to appreciate the value of an old book despite how the game has migrated to the digital medium; the STEM nerds browsing the math and science shelves; the history buffs; the apologists and readers of the Bible; the lovers of poetry and good fiction. Some of the books I will keep for myself, of course, and for the children I might someday have. And some, it saddens me to think, might never find a new home. Who will want all those encyclopedia sets when the Internet is free?
“We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.” Thus Tom Stoppard’s Septimus, when his young student weeps for the library of Alexandria. It is rather a harsh consolation, concluding that though we “die on the march,” the march is all there is, so nothing can be lost to the nothing outside it. I am more consoled by the words of the liturgy, at the presentation of the offering: “All things come of Thee, O Lord, and of Thine own have we given Thee.”
When my father was young and poor, he lived by the words of Erasmus: “When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.” He loved to quote these words years later, when he had more than enough to buy food and clothes and books, and to pay off the house where most of those books would make their home.
It was a house that seemed made for books, a roomy red-brick ranch on the corner of a neighborhood full of little Cape Cods. Several walls in the living area are devoted to alcove shelves. More shelves are cut in the wall of the finished basement, which has room for large bookcases in every corner. Still more shelves are bolted into the back of our furnace room.
The upstairs half of the library aspires to orderliness. Behind the couch lives the reference and encyclopedia bookcase. An almost complete Scientific American Library set dominates the top shelf, followed by an assortment of thick resources on physics, history, art, mathematics, philosophy, and horses. Here still lives the giant blue Webster’s dictionary my tiny self used to wrangle into yielding its secrets. Here still lives the complete World Book Encyclopedia set I would browse flopped on my belly for hours, the 1979 set in which Ronald Reagan is forever governor of California. Here too still lives the Complete Sherlock Holmes I raced to finish reading before my ninth birthday, just to say I did.
In the corner to my right is our little “favorite classics on tap” shelf. Tolkien and Lewis live here with A. A. Milne, Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robinson, and Chaim Potok, alongside more obscure family favorites such as Elizabeth Goudge and Albert Payson Terhune. We still have the Macmillan box set of the Narnia chronicles, the ones that make up for their 1970 cover illustrations by being numbered in publication order.
More literary classics spill over into the alcove shelving. Nestled between Dante and T. S. Eliot is my mother’s doctoral dissertation on Spenser’s Faerie Queene, one of her only pieces of literary scholarship before her research interests turned to my father’s specialty, analytic philosophy. Our shelves preserve the archaeological layers of their scholarly pursuits—from epistemology to philosophy of science to philosophy of religion to New Testament studies. One alcove shelf is dedicated to books on evolution and intelligent design. Court battles have been fought over some of the titles here, debating whether it would constitute a “religious” encroachment to assign them for public school science classes. But these debates never affected me, because this library I called home, I also called school.
When I was a child, I became used to awkwardness when strangers found out I was homeschooled. “Oh,” they would say, fumbling for something polite to say. “Do you like that?” I didn’t know what answer they expected, but I always said that I loved it. How could I not? I lived in a house of ten thousand books. Only later would I realize that this was a little strange, that there was something unusual—indeed, many things unusual—about the way I’d been raised. But then Mom and Dad always taught me not to care too much what other people think.
Homeschooling has never enjoyed broad cultural acceptance, and to this day it is associated with ignorance, misplaced religious zeal, and many worse things. Jokes about “unschooling” abound. The stereotype of the weird, miserably stunted homeschooled kid is alive and well. I was mostly protected from this bigotry, growing up with other kids who, like me, wouldn’t have recognized themselves in these jokes.
I will concede in affectionate hindsight that I was an odd child, with quirks that probably would have put me “on the spectrum” had I ever been diagnosed. I also wore my general out-of-touchness like a badge of honor. There were a T.V. and a V.H.S. player in the basement among all the books, but my family never had cable. Vast tracts of pop culture were thus intentionally closed off to me, with the result that almost any piece of media my parents hand-selected instead seemed like the coolest thing ever. This was reflected in my diction, a hyper-precocious melange of archaisms gleaned from old books, throwback slang from Mom and Dad’s youth, and bits of movie and radio dialogue I’d memorized by osmosis.
I was an old soul musically too, falling in love early with Mom and Dad’s church and pop music (especially that one Christian band whose tapes they hoarded in their rebellious youth, because their fundamentalist Bible college teachers thought even this was too edgy). Our classical collection was small but included the essentials. I would listen to Handel’s Messiah front to back, completely spellbound. When I was five or six, I became obsessed with Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, renting them by the armful from the library. Over time, I developed my own musical voice. With my mom and aunt on Dad’s side, I would practice singing the harmony parts for old-time hymns and gospel songs. My skill on an instrument never developed beyond modest competence, though I was proud that after learning piano the traditional way with Mom, I taught myself how to play by ear like Dad, gravitating to the soft rock tunesmiths he loved. Dad’s younger brother, who was classically trained, occasionally appeared like a fairy godfather to shower me with sheet music and avuncular wisdom. I still have a collection of Charlie Brown music from him, a milestone in my lifelong love affair with jazz.
You might correctly infer that I was not a sporty child, though I could play a mean game of chess. Under Dad’s inspired coaching, this was my most intense extracurricular focus and the theme of many shelves, heaving under the weight of classic texts and old magazines from Dad’s collection. My dresser became crowded with trophies, some of which Dad bought himself as he developed our local chess scene, which thrives to this day. The little triumphs and sorrows of my scholastic career loomed large in those days, though what micro-fame I achieved there would eventually be upstaged by my much more accomplished younger sister.
The ideological benefits of homeschooling are obvious, but besides these I’m moved to reflect on this simple freedom of time—time to train my attention on good and beautiful and difficult things, to furnish my mind with them at my own pace. I have sadly lost some of that gift of attention in the digital age. I flip through a decades-old memo pad logging all the books I read in a given year, in between the little to-do lists I would make for an afternoon of reading, chess study, or whatever else nine-year-old me was working on, and I’m filled with envy.
Of all the beautiful things I was given to store away in those years, none was more beautiful than the Anglican liturgy I repeated every Sunday. In this I was a unicorn even among my fellow unicorns. Our running family joke was that we were “high-church Baptists,” a function of the fact that my parents had “gotten liturgy” in their twenties while never completely breaking with their evangelical roots. They wanted to raise me in the Anglican tradition, but an Episcopal church was theologically out of the question. From a demographic analysis, you wouldn’t have thought that Kalamazoo, Michigan, would be the end of their exploring. Yet their search did end here, in a tiny Anglican Catholic parish incongruously planted on the rougher side of town. I was an unbaptized toddler at the time, and the priest was understandably bemused by this Anglophilic yet stubbornly credobaptist couple. But with an already declining congregation, chiefly composed of elderly mainline “refugees,” he couldn’t lightly afford to turn young would-be members away. As a bonus, Mom could play the organ.
And so it was that I, a millennial child in a southwest Michigan college town, improbably became the heir to all the riches of Anglican Christendom. By the time I was confirmed at age seven, I had memorized long passages from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, along with many of the more memorable tunes from the 1940 Protestant Episcopal hymnal. At Christmas, since we had no choir, I served as the “choir boy” who traditionally kicks off the Nine Lessons and Carols with an a cappella first verse of “Once in Royal David’s City.”
At the time, all of this seemed perfectly normal to me, though it would have baffled the evangelicals with whom we built our broader local homeschooling community. Fortunately, I could also speak fluent evangelical, thanks to my parents’ determination that I should inherit the best of their own heritage. Starting when I was eight, Mom began opening our home for regular “hymn sings,” inviting the community to gather and sing the old songs we all loved, which already too many churches were beginning to neglect. For a few years, I joined a local Baptist church program for girls that kept us busy with regular activities, Scripture memory goals, and the like. Evangelical radio programming also played an important formative role, especially children’s drama shows like Adventures in Odyssey.
I would not be the Christian writer I am today without this spiritually bilingual upbringing. Without my Anglican heritage, my ear would never have been trained on the majestic language of Cranmerian liturgy. My sense of beauty would never have been nurtured by the solemn rhythms of the mass, the sacramental hush of Eucharistic consecration. My appreciation of English history and literature would have been less rich. Yet without my evangelical heritage, I wouldn’t have been so steeped in the study of the Word. I wouldn’t have learned to love the unabashedly sentimental revival hymns and gospel songs that so annoy my higher-church peers. I wouldn’t have learned to speak so unselfconsciously about “a personal relationship with Jesus Christ” or devoted myself so diligently to learning how to “give a reason” for the hope that was in me.
Shelves upon shelves of our home library are dedicated just to my father’s vintage apologetics collection, centuries of accumulated scholarship by forgotten names such as James Blunt and Nathaniel Lardner. And alongside Christianity’s most vigorous defenders, you will also find the faith’s most vigorous enemies, from David Hume to D. F. Strauss to Bart Ehrman. I know exactly where to find Dad’s annotated copy of Ehrman’s book Jesus, Interrupted. There’s a key in the front, including bespoke codes like M for “misleading,” B for “bad exegesis,” and A F S for “argument from silence.”
My parents’ own contributions to biblical scholarship are represented on these shelves too, gathered and distilled into four books by my mother. Their research is unapologetically rooted in the work of those forgotten older apologists, making unfashionable arguments great again. This has sometimes come at a heavy social cost, as they’ve been unafraid to criticize contemporary evangelical scholarship which concedes too much to the skeptics. They’ve mounted those criticisms not from a pre-commitment to a fundamentalist framework but from a dedication to following the argument where they believe it actually leads. Studying these debates inoculated me early to the too-common presumption that mainstream respectability is directly correlated with scholarly objectivity.
Looking back, I see this as part of a systematic inoculation to peer pressure of all kinds. My identity was never wrapped up in what my peers were thinking, what they liked, or how they perceived me. One of the healthiest aspects of homeschooling is that you are taught from an early age how to form a friendly bond with anyone who offers you something valuable, regardless of age or status. My parents in particular were always mindful that they came from culturally despised stock, men and women whose godly wisdom would never earn them graduate degrees or elite social capital. However far from those roots their own paths would take them, they would never forget, and they would always give honor to whom honor was due.
I was always drawn to books about heroes. I felt a particular weight in true stories about the ones who have been forgotten. My journal records the day I pulled Whittaker Chambers’s Witness off a basement shelf at age eleven. How moved I was by that story, and how resolved I was to remember it, no matter how that history might be rewritten.
This was the same year my general obsession with military history was blossoming into a particular obsession with World War II. I found a coffee table book of Medal of Honor citations in Barnes & Noble and gave Mom and Dad no peace until I got it for Christmas. I was also inspired by Oliver North’s Fox series War Stories, which had been converted into books with free sample DVDs I watched on repeat. It was then Dad suggested that I conduct my very own oral history project with my next-door neighbor, who was a World War II veteran. He and his wife were among the first owners of the houses on our street, built for couples like them in the post-war boom. I had known them only as the delighted audience for my backyard musical performances. Now that I was growing up a little, I understood the value of what they could give me in return.
Mr. Ippel and I sat down for three sessions together, recorded on cassette tapes. He unlocked memories for me that he had never even shared with his own children: his adventures in Africa and Italy, stories of friends who cracked under pressure, a freak plane accident that took the lives of his best buddies. At one point, recalling the sight of the Statue of Liberty as he was first being shipped out, he asked me to turn the tape off so he could collect himself.
I winced a little when I heard my own voice on those tapes, high-pitched and occasionally too eager to show off some bit of my own knowledge. But how hard can I be on myself, really? I was eleven, and I was preserving a piece of history. These recordings have only become more precious to me as Mr. Ippel’s war slips out of our collective memory. From this young age, already I was being taught what it means to remember, to preserve, to make little monuments in time. I had met heroes in the pages of books, but I knew then that they walked among us still.
I once wrote an essay looking back to that project with Mr. Ippel as the moment I became a journalist. But truthfully, there was no single moment when I knew I would write for a living. For a long time, I thought that I would join the “family business” and become a philosopher. As a child, I would strain and inevitably fail to keep up with the flow whenever Mom and Dad were doing research or mentoring graduate students. One day, I had a melodramatic meltdown about this, and Mom kindly attempted to console me by saying that she thought I would grow up to do something that made me happy, whatever that was.
One of the best gifts my parents gave me was a program that taught me how to type. This trained me to write as an extension of thought, from school projects to chess game annotations to long rambling emails with friends. I wrote as I breathed. I would never have predicted that it would become my livelihood, but I couldn’t imagine life without it. Whatever I loved, I had to write about, and I loved so many things.
I did study philosophy in college, taking several of my dad’s classes at Western Michigan University. Then I took up and eventually abandoned a career path in mathematics. I loved its rigor, but while I paid all the dues to earn a doctorate, discovering along the way that I loved teaching, I knew I just couldn’t hack a research career. I sometimes wonder what my life would look like had I pursued history or literature. But Mom had already seen the rot setting in when she studied literature at Vanderbilt, and she said it would be hard to find a degree program that didn’t suck the joy out of my chosen field. I could take that risk, or I could simply go on reading and learning as I always had. Just love the books, she told me, and teach others to love them. And in my own small way, carry on the writer’s task as described by Joseph Conrad: “to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.”
I sometimes wonder what will become of my family’s ten thousand books. When the time comes, I imagine inviting family and friends to visit the library and take what they want. I imagine the former philosophy students, now with students of their own; the grown-up chess players, hopefully still able to appreciate the value of an old book despite how the game has migrated to the digital medium; the STEM nerds browsing the math and science shelves; the history buffs; the apologists and readers of the Bible; the lovers of poetry and good fiction. Some of the books I will keep for myself, of course, and for the children I might someday have. And some, it saddens me to think, might never find a new home. Who will want all those encyclopedia sets when the Internet is free?
“We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.” Thus Tom Stoppard’s Septimus, when his young student weeps for the library of Alexandria. It is rather a harsh consolation, concluding that though we “die on the march,” the march is all there is, so nothing can be lost to the nothing outside it. I am more consoled by the words of the liturgy, at the presentation of the offering: “All things come of Thee, O Lord, and of Thine own have we given Thee.”
