Books our heroes read

ALTHOUGH I grew up in a house with books, and was fond of books from childhood, collecting Filipiniana was something that came quite late in life. Our library had an assortment of professional books: business and engineering for my father, cookbooks galore for my mother, and medical books that my aunt used when she was in medical school. One would not really call it a library but a collection of books that at some point were read or periodically consulted.

Aside from the tempting blonde bombshells on their covers, I never took an interest in my father's complete collection of Earle Stanley Gardner and Mickey Spillane crime novels. These books literally taught me not to judge books by their covers because my absentminded father would often buy two or three copies of the same title over the years because they had different covers. Often he would read halfway through the novel before realizing he had read it before. I am not as bad though I have other experiences with book jackets and duplicates that I will relate later.

If only my parents knew that my early sex education came from the books in our modest library, they would have been more careful. Compared with the Internet that unattended children surf through these days, books seem harmless, but to a curious child, books can also open the world beyond his home and experience. Filipino parents then and now have difficulty discussing sex with their underage children, leaving them to learn both fact and fiction from others. In my case, sex education resulted from constant browsing through my aunt's medical books. There was a lot of nudity in these books, but unfortunately the pictures depicted so much disease and abnormality that celibacy seemed to me the only option in life.

One can never underestimate the power of books on a young and curious mind. My youngest sister was more daring. She explored my parents' bedroom as a child and only now, in her mid-30s, admitted that she found our parents' transcripts of school records and the illustrated "Joy of Sex" tucked away somewhere. That may explain why, in contrast to my dysfunctional self, she is happily married with two children and is now expecting twins.

Jose Rizal grew up in a home that had a library, reputedly one of the largest and best in the Philippines at the time, and his intellectual gifts have been traditionally linked to an early desire to read. We are all familiar with the story of Rizal's mother reading the tale of the moth and the flame to him, but we do not realize that he watched, with a mixture of fascination and horror, how a moth actually singed its wings on a lighted lamp by the table and drowned in the coconut oil. Rizal read a great deal but definitely not from their family library, which is as famous, at least to Filipinos, as the lost library of Alexandria. Most of the books he read and acquired as an adult he encountered during his travels around Europe.

Books, like the Internet, require some curiosity and effort before they become useful. If books were the source of Rizal's intellectual gifts, how come his brother and sisters did not turn out the same way even if they grew up in the same home and were exposed to the same books? Remember that Rizal was the seventh of 11 children. How come we do not know about the minds of his nine sisters or even his parents?

His elder brother Paciano was also a wide reader but he read in retirement after earning the rank of general in the Philippine Revolution and the Filipino-American War. In peace, Paciano tried to make up for lost time. His bedside reading in his lakeside retirement home in Los Baños town in their province of Laguna happened to be current Philippine periodicals and the Encyclopedia Britannica, which he tried to finish from cover to cover, from A to Z.

We also have a list of books on a shelf in a warehouse in Manila's Tondo district that made up Andres Bonifacio's modest library. The list supplied is quite short and we presume that Bonifacio read everything, including Rizal's novels, "Noli Me Tangere" and "El Filibusterismo." Like Rizal, the "Supremo" [Supreme Leader] of the Katipunan also read "The Wandering Jew" by Eugene Sue, and "Ruins of Palmyra." Bonifacio also read a book on the French Revolution and a book titled "Lives of the Presidents of the United States." One could say that these books helped spark the Philippine Revolution.

Apolinario Mabini also read the novels of Rizal aside from books on law.

I'm not sure about Bonifacio, but Rizal and Apolinario Mabini were fans Balagtas. While Rizal carried a copy of "Florante at Laura" during his European travels, Mabini brought the same with him in his head. When he was exiled to Guam, one of the American jailers requested Mabini to recommend a great Filipino book. Mabini not only recommended Balagtas, he wrote down the entire book from memory and presented this to the astonished American. While I have many favorite titles, I have not memorized any of these from cover to cover as Mabini did.

Since Rizal kept a list of the books he read and owned, it is possible to get to know him better. One of my greatest thrills was stepping inside the Library of Congress in Washington and walking through a special display of Thomas Jefferson's library, which formed the founding nucleus of the Library of Congress.

Books are the furniture in our minds. Show me what books you read and I will tell you who you are.

Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu