I suspect/hope that other people are better at moving than I
am. It is not as if I have not done it before. This will be my third time
moving 5,000 kilometres. One would hope/assume that I would be getting better
at it. I don't think that I am.
I have so much stuff!! In spite of my best intentions to de-clutter
my existence, I am having an extraordinarily hard time doing so. Take for
example my books. I love books. In every room of my house there are books laying
about in various stages of being read. I love the thought of books, of touching
them, of opening them up and getting lost into whatever story the author has
decided to tell me. I long ago decided that I would not keep any novels. At one
point I had an eight by ten room whose walls were hidden by bookshelves filled
with books, two layers deep. I never put a book up on those shelves unless I
was interested in reading it again. It saddened me to get rid of those books but
we have libraries that are more than willing to keep those books and hundreds
of others for me. And now, of course, we have those same libraries lending
books on-line. So with the exception of some boy's novels (mainly by Henty)
that belonged to my father and a few other books, I have very few novels to get
rid of. Of the handful of paperbacks I do have, they will all go to the library
to be resold at their next used book sale.
I however, have a large number of text books. One of the
many joys of teaching at the college level was receiving books from the
publisher who hoped that I would order that text for a class. I read every one
of the books given to me. I never chose one for my class, but for the most part
I enjoyed reading them. I also have a number of other non-fiction books that I
have collected through the years. Do I keep them? Why? The odds of me ever
teaching sociology or community development again are so remote that even the
most ambitious odds maker in Las Vegas could not do the necessary calculations.
But some of the books were really good and have important data in them. I have
other books - some that I have had for years that are important to me - my
first book of poetry that I ever bought (Cohen's Flowers for Hitler), John Porter's The Vertical Mosaic (the first theoretical book that I read outside of school work),
some plays I worked on at university, a book about Hitler (from which I wrote a
paper in some ways admiring his sociological skills in mastering the public's
emotions - it was the first time that I wrote a paper that I knew was doomed to
not be like by a professor and did it anyways) and other assorted books that
mark milestones in my intellectual/academic/ emotional life. So I will keep about half of my books - which
still leaves me needing, in my new place to create space for about twenty feet
of shelving. I had hoped to do better. Perhaps I will do one more cull before I
seal up the boxes.
Disposing of books always makes me sad. It is not only that
I am leaving good human friends behind as I move out to the West Coast, I am
also abandoning some friends - some of whom have sat on my bookshelves for over
thirty-five years. They have given me pleasure by their feel, their smell. their
content and sometimes, as books are almost the first thing I unpack when I move,
their very look upon their shelves telling me that I am home.
No comments:
Post a Comment