Читать книгу Salvation in My Pocket - Benjamin Myers - Страница 11

When I was forced to play team sports as a boy, I would wait in diminishing hope as all the other boys were chosen one by one. In the end there would be two of us left, me and the kid with coke-bottle glasses who couldn’t tie his own shoes and who was known to burst into tears if he ever lost the ball or got knocked down. For agonizing seconds the two hairy-legged captains would size us up, until, finally, one would turn to the other and pronounce the cruel verdict: “You can have them.” (I cannot lie: this happened even when my own best friend was one of the team captains.)

Yes, I know what it is to be unwanted. I suppose that’s why Calvinist theology has always appealed to me, and why I was forever bringing home stray kittens as a boy. It is also why I sympathize with the unwanted book, the book nobody else will buy or read, the book that might have languished in embarrassed silence until the end of the world, unchosen. It is part of Christian belief in the resurrection to assert that nothing is ultimately unwanted, nothing finally lost or forgotten. When the last trump sounds and the sea gives up its dead, whatever was neglected or cast aside will be raised up and kept forever in the presence of the one in whom Memory and Love are joined.

So sometimes when I’m rummaging in the darkest corner of a used bookstore, I will choose a book just because it looks lonely and forgotten. I find myself treating the book with special respect, handling it gently, patiently studying the binding, admiring the typeface, before finally taking it to a special place—a favorite café, or the beach, or the shade of a tree I love—where I can read it slowly and in secret. Like one of those orphaned kittens, I love the book even more because it is rejected by the world. By reading the unwanted book, I give my silent witness to the coming day when all the books will be opened and the last will be first and whatever was forgotten will be remembered in love, world without end.