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I cut the slot myself, working with a bent keyhole saw, so that the inner lip of metal juts above the ragged wood and effectively blocks whatever letters the mailman attempts to insert. After rattling the brass flap angrily for up to five minutes, he rams his shoulder against the door, losing his powder-blue cap and twenty-five pounds of
National Geographics
, and throws everything into the foyer, including four dividend checks for the lady next door. After delivering the checks, and running after the mailman with his cap, I return to my house and find that the children have already torn open the Jiffy book envelopes, an operation that has left the floor evenly coated with iron-colored fluff.
    At Point B, next to our four-sided three-legged table, the books arepresented to me. I gratefully inhale the fragrance of the bindings, slice all uncut pages, and even read a few paragraphs. I am especially apt to begin reading if the book is one for which I have sent. For instance,
A History of Japan to 1334
, by George Sansom (Stanford University Press): the physical presence of this book, so substantial, so fresh, the edges so trim, the type so tasty, reawakens in me, like a Proustian talisman, the emotions I experienced when, in my youth, I ordered it. “About time I knew something about Japan up to 1334,” I say again to myself, and again seem to stand overlooking a vast landscape bathed in lifting mist. Soon that distant line of trees, that vague row of Fujiwara regents, will embower my marching strides; that remote cottage, that Hōryūii monastery, will house me tonight. Then the dinner bell, or the doorbell, or the alarm bell, rings, and the unread book takes up its first station, at C, on top of the television set.
    Here it resides for an indeterminate period. As new arrivals pile in, the stack grows irregular, and by osmotic pressure they reshuffle themselves so that the largest are on the bottom, for stability. They withstand a constant sidewise pressure from a vase of pussy willows, and spasmodic tremors when the children manipulate the volume dial. Sometimes, even, a few of the upper, lighter books fall behind the set into the morass of wiring; but by and large they are secure here, in the shade of the pussy willows, on a high ledge where ashtrays and coffee cups and broken crayons seldom climb. So it always startles me when, suddenly one night, they pull up stakes, spattering the wallpaper with phosphorescent dye, and take a new stance, at D, the top of a bookcase.
    Here you would think they would find peace. This is a bookcase, after all, and they are books. But it is a bookcase in which several years ago I scrupulously arranged, in chronological order, shelves of American literature, English literature, Russian, Spanish, and Irish (a pretty triplet, I thought) literature so neatly and tightly that our purchases in all of these categories have had to stop. True, there is more flexibility in the top shelf, containing French books and “little, cute” volumes like Peter Pauper editions of Malayan aphorisms, and in the bottom shelf, reserved for big, strikingly uncute books—Belloc’s biography of Danton, the bound reports of the Rhode Island Audubon Society, and college anthologies scribbled with insane notes like “Marvellous!,” “Micro-macro,” and “Cf. Romantic
Angst
”—but time with its relentless neap tide has wedged even these catch-alls solid. So the unread books recline uneasily on top,still on their sides, suffering the company of porcelain figurines, water glasses full of dripping daffodils, and children’s drawings, which move around the house in a sort of counter-swirl to the unread books. I have often noticed how at this stage their jackets, though untouched, begin to tatter with despair.
    One night, when we are all asleep and except for the twitching of the thermostat the house is still, the unread books leap into the air, sail through the kitchen door, bank jauntily over the stove, and coast