Culling Books
I am a packrat. "Stuff" appeals to me. Even when it comes to aesthetic properties that draw me as an artist, I am all about texture and layering. (Someday I am going to collage.) Memorabilia is hard to throw out, and with the recent exit of my daughter from the house (don't worry, she just went to college), the bittersweet scent of nostaligia virtually drips from the mantel.
Nonetheless, I've been convicted that "stuff" needs to go.
The place of hardest culling is with books. I have probably 4000-5000 volumes. And quite frankly, these are my friends. Reading has been my teacher, so much so that whatever I've learned of say, tennis, I learned from a book. It has always been my first instinct to go to a book when I needed to learn a thing. I still consider that a virture, as archaic as it sounds in these days of internet and theology by watching film.
What came as baggage though--specifically American baggage, I'm afraid--was the desire to own all these books. I wanted them on my shelf, so that I could pull them down on a whim. And frankly, given my teaching over the years, I've needed a lot of them close at hand. But many of them just sit there, staring at me, collecting dust. I've moved them across country, boxed and unboxed some of them 4 or 5 times, never cracking the cover.
Just for the fun of it, I pulled out a few books, around ten I think, and thought I'd run down to Half-Price Books here in Seattle, and see what I could get for them. I picked books that were nice volumes, but that I really wasn't all that interested in. Still, it was painful. For 10 books, they gave me $6.
Those books probably cost me $150. Ouch.
So I'm culling the ones I'd need on my desert Island, and saying goodbye to the rest. I figure they deserve to be read, so I should make them available to others. The tug of wanting to own and hoard is a strange beast, revealing more than I'd like it to. I have a friend who believes very much in the "lightness of being" and I can't for the life of me think of why he's not dead on.
What books would you keep?
My initial goal is to get down to 500, and then we'll see where we are. (I'm taking a pretty large boat to get to my desert island, I guess.)
Next dilemma. Should I sell or give away? And remember, Amy just went to college.
My world will be lighter...
5:10:47 AM 
