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At the end, even his books could not keep him here.
Bygone...
Long before the rest of us accepted what was coming, my father began thinning his personal library, some of the books there companions from his earliest days.
The Enthusiastic scholar would now only keep a few that were personally important to him. With the rest, he’d browse through each before parting, allowing the pleasure of a final encounter.
Perhaps remembering when the book crossed his path, where he was on his journey of earthy engagement, what point of inquiry it had answered.
Her ability to remember his vison of her falters. This strikes her as an unfaithfulness to him.
He’d come back from the public library, an institution dear to his heart, empty handed. The offerings no longer compelled him, he’d say.
Nothing remarkable to bring home, to share by reading aloud, one of his lifelong practices.
What he did carry home were tales of the children he’d seen in The Little Books section.
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"In 40 BCE... ... Rome's first public library was established by a friend of the poet Virgil, Asinius Pollio. The idea seems to have originated with Julius Caesar who had admired the public libraries he had seen in Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and was determined to bestow such an institution upon the Roman people....
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The Library established by Pollio was built on the Aventine Hill and paid for, in the typical Roman way, by wealth seized from the conquered... Altogether, by the fourth century CE, there were twenty-eight libraries in Rome...
The reading room...…was adorned with busts or life-sized statues of celebrated writers: Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, among others.
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The statues functioned …as an honorific, a gesture toward the canon of writers whom every civilized person should know...
But in Rome they may have had an additional significance… That is, they were signs of access to the spirits of the dead, symbols of the spirits that the books enabled readers to conjure up."
Is Thinking Daughter in danger?
After he died, my brother and I sorted through the books he’d left behind.
One stack to the antiquarian bookseller, another to the homeless reading program.
A few, requested by the library at the University where he’d taught, were sent, then lost, by the US Mail.