‘Books are points of resistance’
Books have been a symbol of resistance on many occasions when there has been an abuse of power. With a book in your hands, even solitude becomes a free and open space. But today as well, in our democratic societies, books and bookstores are points of resistance against those who would turn us into uncritical consumers, citizens spellbound by fleeting idols, governed not by the people we vote for but by the interests of corporations who wish us to be complacent in out lot. To read is to question the apparently obvious, to question what is established, and to enter a bookstore is to let ourselves be surrounded by those who have so many things to tell us so that we may retain our human dignity. ~ Monika Zgustova
My earliest memory of myself with a book in hand stretches as far back as eight years old. It was a pocket-sized volume of the collection of essays by Michel de Montaigne, philosopher of the French Renaissance.
It wasn’t your commonplace age-appropriate book for an eight-year-old stump like me, I know. I filched the book together with two others — the inch-thick The Book of Torture (with lots of illustrations and woodcuts during the Inquisition) and a thin anthology called Playboy’s Party Jokes — from my dad’s modest library of 100-page penny Westerns and other curiosities with a spine.
My dad was a bookworm who read everything from Wild West gunslingers to the Danish master of the mind-fuck, Søren Kierkegaard (but that distinction I now give to Ludwig Wittgenstein). He loved history, Asian and indigenous spirituality, anything on Comparative Theology and Medieval superstitions. Spy-authors Ken Follet and Frederick Forsyth formed the cornerstone of his collection of novels.
I remember enjoying The Book of Torture and Playboy’s Party Jokes for their illustrations. At eight, I barely understood anything I’ve read. However, for some reason, I had an inkling that if I got caught red-handed by my mom tinkering with Playboy’s Party Jokes, surely I will get my ass whooped.
Call it school-boy intuition. I hid the books under the mattress together with an early version of a fillet knife and playing cards.
Michel de Montaigne’s essays were of particular interest to me because it had no illustration whatsoever. Just wall after wall of words. This curiosity had more to do with how the letters and words appeared on paper than what they meant. I began to understand bits of it only later, after I reached twelve. I still have the book with me today.
As for Playboy’s Party Jokes, it was inevitably confiscated by my mom who had a knack of finding the weirdest things at the oddest places. However, my ass was spared.
It would be safe to say that Montaigne was the very first writer who taught me the intrinsic power of words. By that I mean the power to compel me, or any person, to act after having read a line or sets of lines. I was somewhere between 12 or 13, if memory serves, when, bored to death with television reruns, I picked up his collection of essays and read this line in the middle of the night:
To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.
This particular line struck my 12-year-old mind like an arrow from out of nowhere. For some reason, I understood it the way I understood toy soldiers. I easily concluded back then that there was something about reading in the wee hours that opens doors to vast distances, to unexplored realms. I read the first paragraph over and over again if only for the sheer enjoyment of seeing something I have never seen before.
All that Montaigne tried to say in the first paragraph was this: that study, learning, knowledge and philosophy all point to one end — ‘to teach us not to fear to die’. As a kid of 12, I have witnessed several deaths in the family, and have wondered why people expire. Thus my continuing fascination with topics related to death, the opposite sex, and why, as kids, we needed to eat those darn vegetables.
It was at this juncture when I started thinking for myself. Raised in a family much too feudal and Catholic for its own good, thinking independently didn’t bode well for me. I had more curiosity than nine lives could ever sustain. This also proved disastrous because at 12, the country was three years under military rule. Any dinner table inquiries from a 12-year-old boy on politics or the dictator and why someone wanted to assassinate the First Lady were shunned like the plague. Yes, I saw the TV footage of the attempt when I was nine.
I stuck with Montaigne until about the age of 14. From then on, I went out in search of other philosophers. Luckily, my uncle, a lawyer by profession, owned books by Friedrich Nietzsche, John Locke, Thomas Paine, Plato, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Hardly with any cash to purchase a page, let alone a whole book, I decided ultimately to steal every single one of them.
I henceforth included ‘book thief’ in my list of professions when I grew up, that is, next to being a cardiologist or, if luck would have it, a Shaolin kung fu master.
Before even college arrived, I had more books than my young mind could ever commit to memory. After years of reading, what became noticeable was this uncanny skill to spot bullshit in my teachers and professors. Calling them out on something I felt they were totally ignorant of put me at risk of being suspended for three days, if not expelled yet from the university.
Well, ultimately, I did get suspended for a month after questioning Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. One case led to the other and before I knew it, I had been expelled. The same happened in three other universities where I transferred. Alas, I dropped the idea of finishing school for the more immediate requirement of getting a job.
This level of adulting, however, came only after we booted the dictator out of Malacanang.
Reading Monika Zgustova’s words today brought me back to the singular reality of how books became my points of resistance as a child. In my search for an identity, I questioned everything — from my family’s faith to the government’s relationship with the governed. It got me into more trouble than I was able to manage well, but they were well worth it.
At close to 60, some of my best moments are spent either with family and friends, or the hours of writing, or better yet, with just a book in hand, couched in a corner where I can shut the world out in exchange for other worlds. In that not-so-safe space, I wrestle with ideas and theories before accepting them as my own.
There is so much out there that the more I read, the more my curiosity is triggered, which is no different in saying that the more I lock my face between the pages, the more ignorant I feel.
Today, I have a personal library of a little over a thousand volumes of well-chosen titles and genres, both local authors and foreign, the only heirloom I can leave my wife and children. Obviously, I have not read them all. There are books I read and reread, and there are those I embrace, smell, and value as physical works of art.
And after all the books I’ve read on philosophy — from Plato to Aristotle, Walter Benjamin to Slavoj Žižek —I have not been able to cast aside my fear of death. I still fear it the way I fear flying cockroaches, thunder claps and Mr. Bean. But to me now, its bite is no more worse than its bark.
In times of crisis and authoritarian abuse, there is more reason to purchase and read books than otherwise. Because we cannot sit idly by and settle with being uncritical beings. Books provide the skills we need to detect what is foolhardy and what is wise.
I have learned in all my reading that it is not philosophy but love that overcomes my fear of death.
Sadly, though, Montaigne will not get the chance to read my books.
