Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Moving #3 - What a mess!!


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.

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