Tsinelas.org - Success Stories

SOME EMBARRASSMENT sank in after Tsinelas Foundation’s first round of “Their Books,” a nonesuch charity fair that pools the old books of Cebu journalists. I ended up donating a yellowing set of Shakespeare cliff notes and plays. I had bought a hefty Complete Works, and thought I could clear up some shelves. But after discovering what the others have handed in, I saw their great gestures too scary and painful. I couldn’t do it.

Next week will see the second wave of “Their Books,” and as Tsinelas founder Insoy Niñal said, Facebook has made it easier to whip up a deluge of donated books. The National Book awardee, fictionist Carlos Cortes, has brought boxes from his precious collection. That will be most interesting to scour.

So I found myself scanning my own shelves, carefully surveying the motley spines of titles old and new. There was “Pakistan” and “How Radical Islam Reaches America,” hard-bound and never read. I bought them after the great US president Bush declared, “Either you’re for us or against us.” The interest fell kerplunk in a brief trajectory.

I found Peter Matthiessen’s “Snow Leopard” with its brown, brittle pages being eaten up at the edges by some strange, unexplainable ulcer. On a page, I saw a big exclamation point leaning towards the line, “I understand much better now Einstein’s remark that the only real time is that of the observer, who carries with him his own time and space.” The “Snow Leopard” obliquely tells a real-life tale of a fresh widower who sets out on a journey to the Himalayas. Beside it on the shelf was “Snow,” a novel by Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. I scanned the pages, and saw a blizzard of marginal notes, and thought I have unfinished business there.

I went cursorily through the pages of the other books and saw a whole thread of memories: marked lines, punctuations, marginal notes, notes I no longer understand or cipher, phone numbers, addresses, doodles, names of people I forgot, grocery receipts with unfinished poetry, coffee and beer stains, an old stamp, a dry leaf, Post-its with lists, price-tags in between chapters.

Most of all, the notes and marked words. I turn to them each time the present shows a kind of void, when it ceases to surprise. I turn to a page, discover an old note, and more than being hurled back to the past, it shows you a pretty good measure of how much space you have covered all these years. The books, you realize, are actually just parts of a grand narrative and, to borrow Jorge Luis Borges’ idea, belong to a singular author. The notes converse and you discover it once you have them all around you as a coherent collection. Amidst the books, when the light is on, I settle in a campfire of familiar strangers and storytellers.

I read like a jealous lover. To borrow Orhan Pamuk’s words, “bliss in seclusion,” which implies the secret affairs I found between the pages that I couldn’t readily share, but instead mark them right on the spot. The notes leave some kind of mental footprints, or white pebbles Hansel and Gretel dropped to help them find their way home.

This is for me the hardest part about donating my old books to Tsinelas’ “Their Books.” I am helplessly selfish with my memories, which could rest in the slightest bend of a punctuation on a dog-eared page of an old book or a marginal note that doesn’t really make so much sense now.

So I figured I will put myself on the other side of the fair in support of “Their Books,” which opens next week at the Ayala Mall, specifically near the Watson’s corridor. I will shop.

By Januar Yap
Sun.Star Cebu, September 18, 2009