Amos Oz with his parents
Fania and Yehuda Arye Klausner
Jerusalem 1946
I am reading “A Tale of Love and Darkness” by Amos Oz. It is his autobiography. The only other book I read by him is "How to Cure a Fanatic" which I bought in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem last year. Oz passed away just a few days ago, so I decided to read about his life. He has written more than twenty novels and nearly as many non-fiction works. Just 24 pages into the book, I am finding it magical. I transcribe passages I like so I can remember them and refer to them again. Below is a long and beautiful passage about books and love and life.
To introduce the passage: Oz was born in Jerusalem in 1939. His father
was a librarian. When Amos was seven,
his father gave him one half of one of the many bookshelves that filled their
small apartment. Amos lined up the books by height. When his father came home,
he was aghast. Then he was silent. The
passage that follows is beautiful. It is a lesson I learned much later than
Amos Oz. As I read the passage I was overwhelmed with the recognition that
occurs when I read something and know that the writer and I see some part of
the world the same way. Oz writes:
“At the end
of the silence Father began talking, in the space of twenty minutes, he
revealed to me the facts of life. He held nothing back. He initiated me into
the deepest secrets of the librarians lore: he laid bare the main highway as well
as the forest tracks, dizzying prospects of variations, nuances, fantasies,
exotic avenues, daring schemes and even eccentric whims. Books can be arranged
by subject, by alphabetical order of authors’ names, by series of publishers,
in chronological order, by languages, by topics, by areas and fields, or even
by place of publication. There are so many different ways.
“And so I
learnt the secret of diversity. Life is made up of different avenues.
Everything can happen in one of several ways, according to different musical
scores and parallel logics. Each of the parallel logics is consistent and
coherent in its own terms, perfect in itself, indifferent to all the others.
“In the
days that followed I spent hours on end arranging my little library, twenty or
thirty books that I dealt and shuffled like a pack of cards, rearranging them
in all sorts of different ways.
“So I
learnt from books the art of composition, not from what was in them but from
the books themselves, from their physical being. They taught me about the
dizzying no-man’s-land or twilight zone between permitted and forbidden,
between the legitimate and the eccentric, between the normative and the
bizarre. This lesson has remained with me ever since. By the time I discovered
love, I was no greenhorn. I knew that there different menus. I knew that there
was a motorway and a scenic route, also unfrequented byways where the foot of
man had barely trodden. There were permitted things that were almost forbidden
and forbidden things that were almost permitted. There were so many different
ways.”
