Faulkner's Imagination Lubricant: Boon or Hindrance?

Okay, so I went to a friend's 80th birthday party tonight in Old Preston Hollow, the mind-bogglingly rich neighborhood where former president George W. Bush has recently acquired some square footage.  Not sure whether the Frida Kahlo's and the Diego Rivera's gracing the walls were authentic, but the rest of the vast urban estate bore an unmistakable frisson of silent connoisseurship, impeccable taste, and invincible wealth.

Whenever I manage to wangle an invite to these enclaves of the hyper-fortunate, I find an excuse to wander the grounds, armed with a flute of champagne or a tumbler of single-malt, until I locate the library.  Just as some in the publishing world can derive hidden data about the sexual orientation of the guy who did the index (Kurt Vonnegut--Cat's Cradle), I learn a lot about my hosts from a few minutes studying the books on the walls.

Here, for example in addition to a plenitude of ordinary volumes:  Jude the Obscure in a Barnes and Noble hardcover, with the erudite maroon binding; Faulkner's Nobel-nominated late picaresque novel The Reivers; Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris in the original French; three plays by the martyred Spanish genius Federico Garcia Lorca;  Rand's Atlas Shrugged, but only in a cheap mass-market paperback (rather than enshrined in hardcover like a cultist of objectivism might display).

More indicative, everything on the shelves willy-nilly, without a hint of organization, except the volumes having to do with Mexican art, sculpture, and belles-lettres, here collected by subject.  Thus are the passions of a house revealed.

There are three reasons to keep books, and three only:  the lowest is to impress passers-by with your erudition and taste; like Jay Gatsby, you have the books without ever bothering to slice the pages open.  The median is stacks of good books organized only very generally, obviously in mid-read, a project in process of transferring ideas from barbaric ignorance to the bare beginnings of knowledge; such is my own working library au moment.  The third and highest is the library of an advanced mind, where the books have attained their places in precisely the same order as they occupy in the intellect of their owner, a sort of hard-copy for the overstuffed cerebrum, in which it is not necessary to remember the opening words of Cicero's First Oration Against Catiline, in the original Latin, because you know precisely where that volume sits (between Caesar's Gallic War and Suetonius, perhaps; Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is on another shelf entirely).