Library of America -- W.E.B. DuBois

Vaquero has found A Mercy an excruciating experience (he has little patience for fiction in general, and this latest of Morrison's literally put his teeth on edge), so we agreed to drop this work as our read-aloud and do W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk instead.

This a work, and an author that we so often have not read but feel as though we have because it is so often referred to, though perhaps not as much now as in the last century? The case is neither of us has read any DuBois, which seems surprising now, particularly since Felipe Smith's brilliant study, American Body Politics, (1998) employs DuBois's work so extensively in its own arguments. In certain ways Smith's work is a further revelation of DuBois's thought.

The Souls of Black Folk, a series of essays, was published in 1903. It's expression is so contemporary in large parts that they sound as if written today. They appear to look ahead to this very moment of the election of Barack Obama. But this modern style is blended with the nineteenth century style of extensive and extended metaphoric expression, which can get a bit wearing, like sermons will do. However, overall, DuBois is such a clean and clear thinker that he reads easily from the tongue to the ears and to the mind. It's difficult to provide higher praise for a writer than that.

We're reading The Souls of Black Folk in the Library of America edition that includes The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade • The Souls of Black Folk • Dusk of Dawn • Essays. Just because we're reading from a volume of this prestigious imprint, this seal that the writer is in the canon of American Literature and Letters, I had this peculiar experience. At one point a question about DuBois's background came up. Vaquero says, "I have no idea." I say, "This is the Library of America -- there will be at least a biographical essay and chronology and bibliography in the back." Vaquero marks our place with the convenient bound-in ribbon and flips to the back, where the answer is swiftly discovered. I felt I'd entered the true world, the world of literature and thought and letters, where I belonged, the world that mattered. A world in which I felt so safely at home. It was a sensation that long ago I inhabited all the time.

Why and how did that change? Computers, and google, etc. have something to do with this, but just what I'm not sure. But there was something, as that ribbon was placed to keep our place, the riffle to the back of the book, to find the answer to a question about the text that was in the book itself, that nudged this feeling into life.