Meanwhile, living with him, I’ve become conscious of the alternative biography my books represent, a history of stray intentions, youthful aspirations, old interests that have run their course but not quite expired, since there’s always that chance I might decide to learn at last about portrait miniatures, or neuroscience, or the Battle of the Alamo. If a friend writes a book, he gets to it as soon as he can if his father randomly sends him a biography of some musician, he’ll read that I myself am hesitant to ever give him a book, knowing that it represents an obligation that I would never feel in his place, namely to read the thing from start to finish.įor such a compulsive-er, scrupulous-person, the bookshelves trace a straightforward history of his reading life, one kind of intellectual biography. Although I’m sure I meant to read the book, now it seems to me entirely foreseeable that I would not, in the 19 years since then, have so much as skimmed a chapter of Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures, because it is just the sort of book that I would order and then eagerly leaf through when it arrives and then stick on the shelf and never read.ĭoesn’t every bibliophile do this, buy books and fail to read them? Actually no-or so I learned halfway through those 19 years of owning Love and Loss, when I started dating the person I would eventually marry. The book came out in 2000, to accompany an exhibition of miniatures at Yale University Art Gallery, and I bought it not long afterward, though I can’t remember precisely when or why. I own a book called Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures, itself a small object with a haunting image on the cover: a tiny 19th-century portrait of a dead teenage girl.
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