Something I've hidden

Richard
Something I’ve hidden
Barnes & Noble, October 29, 2008

For a brief period in the 1960’s I stole books. It felt as if someone else were doing it in my body.

I stole philosophy books I didn’t understand but wanted to—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Frege, Wittgenstein. The reading came in handy later, when I was studying philosophy at university, but at the time I was drawn to the authors’ names on the spines and to the titles: Fear and Trembling, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Sense and Reference, Zettel. I didn’t care about actually reading the books. Oh, the unconscious mind, I mean I was stealing books called “fear and trembling” and “on truth and lies,” and I didn’t even find it ironic!

I stole from the Midland Educational Bookshop in Leicester, before it went out of business in the 1970’s. If I contributed to its demise, I deeply regret it. I liked to nick from the top of columns of books stacked on a stand at the top of the stairs, beside the lift. An easy duck. A step or two, and down and away. Not that I fled, until the end. I would saunter along and slip a slim volume into my jacket pocket and with heart pounding continue the charade of nonchalance. I would do it during my lunch break when I worked selling hose pipe licenses at the Water Department and thought I would never, ever escape my life.

If a policeman caught me, what would I say? I didn’t plan to steal books, officer, the urge just came over me one day? The splitting was what I was after, the kick of watching myself as if I were someone else, which is what I was dying to be, although I didn’t know how unhappy I was. I was still living with Marylyn. Trevor was only a year or two. I hadn’t yet met Meg and made the dash to another life. Was I hoping to be caught, lose my job, break everything apart? I can’t say.

That possibility loomed, however, one day mid-week. Few people were about. It was a good time to pilfer. I spotted Alfred North Whitehead’s Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect, and I was fumbling to pocket it when a man and a woman passed me, having just come up the stairs. I jammed the book in the pocket and folded over the flap, and as I did I saw the woman looking at me. She was middle aged and wore a black velvet hat pulled low on her forehead. As she passed, she glanced down to my pocket and leaned over to whisper in the man’s ear. He wore a tartan wool cap and had a small, neat mustache, and I saw him shudder slightly, but he placed his hand on the woman’s elbow and walked on and then both turned to look at me, as if to gather an understanding of the biblioklept or maybe decide whether to let him go or turn him in. I was not in my body, but I did not know what to make of the thief, either. I wanted to run but circled the stand with the missing volume and made my way to the stairs and slowly walked down and out of the store, not daring to look back.

I didn’t return for weeks and when I did they’d replaced Whitehead with Jean Paul Sartre. I paid for Nausea, which I took home and read and, ironically again, didn’t understand, even though the novel is about a man in whom objects produce a sense of sweaty dread. And this was my secret until now.