We live in a small house. I partly like it that way (except that we can't entertain as comfortably as we'd like) because it makes us keep posessions from accumulating. Anything new needs to be accompanied by pitching something to make room for it. The hardest aspect of this rule is when it comes to books.
A few days ago I was looking at my bookshelf of lesser-valued books, trying to decide what to give away. This is such a melancholy process: remembering that I really enjoyed a book, only vaguely remembering its details, and hardest, admitting that I'll likely never read it again -- a small death.
We recently re-watched the Steven Speilberg movie Empire of the Sun, a movie that was for me overly cinematically contrived, except for one scene that was absolutely arresting and which comes back to me from time to time: the mostly-British survivors of Japanese detainment camps in China, after walking a long way through fields, come to a stadium seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Walking throught the gates they find strewn across the entire field all the items of opulence and luxury that soldiers have taken from their estates: grandfather clocks, grand pianos, and beautiful furniture, all just strewn about as in some heavenly junkyard. The message isn't subtle, and the sense of wasted effort is what strikes me most, both the effort of accumulating that wealth and the effort of dragging it to this luxury graveyard.
It's the essence of that feeling that strikes me when I have to consider getting rid of a book.
[There's one bright note here: getting rid of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science will make room for three new books, and there's no sense of loss.]
January 01, 2004 07:15 AM