Academics behave like hamsters. Instead, though, of A stuffing their jowls with lettuce and raisins, and when A the wind is in the east, their offspring, they lard houses with books—in the attic, in the basement, on top of the stereo in the living room, on a gold rack in the john. Occasionally, an academic will declare that he is going to stop cluttering his life with books. Don't believe him. Academics are worse off than a woe-begone sinner I heard testify in a tent meeting in Arkansas. Before settling down to heal hopeless cripples, the preacher called upon the congregation to witness to the power of the Spirit. A sister who looked like Hard Rock Mountain had fallen on her stood up. "Before I knew the Spirit," she said, "I used to get drunk every night and lie in the gutter with some strange man. Now," she continued, "I've almost quit."

Like the poor sister, the academic can almost quit books. For a while he might put bookstores behind him and testify that he is going to take a broom to his library. Not a volume, though, will ever appear in the garbage can. I am the only academic in the eastern United States to escape the bondage of books. It wasn't easy, but I did it. That preacher in Arkansas would be proud of me.

Not so long ago I moved from Dartmouth College to the University of Connecticut. Before leaving New Hampshire I shed more than six hundred volumes. Like a fat man who has jogged himself into a thin man, I feel better. My house is not a firetrap; squirrels don't build nests in the attic. Mice don't multiply in mildewed volumes in the basement, and all a visitor can find in the cabinet in the john is tooth paste, shaving cream, a pile of rusty razor blades, a bar of Zest, and four cans of "Pinewoods" Renuzit.