BOOKS, BOOKS, BOOKS
Today Susie suggested that I decide what to do with the books in my front hallway that have been there for a several months waiting for me to sort through them.
I tried. For half an hour I tried. And then I put the books all back in the boxes. The reason was because these four boxes of books are not the problem. It is the 50 or more boxes of books in the storage locker, sitting there unlooked at for twenty or more years, it is the twenty or thirty boxes of books in my carport and laundry room that are boxed away and impossible to look at. I have to decide what to do with all 80 boxes at once, deciding book by book won’t help.
If I had storage space I could open an on line bookstore. The way to reach people who want to buy something, as Amazon has shown, it on line. Second hand bookstores in town, Downtown Book and News, Mr. K‘s and others are half second hand bookstores with aisles of cataloged books and half on line book stores receiving and shipping orders. They have a steady stream of incoming used books from people like me for which they pay very little and double the price when they resell them.
I solved the problem of collecting books several years ago, much too late, by only buying e-books. These are stored, not on my computer but on the cloud. The advantage, if it is one, of actual books, is that they can be sold or given away as I hope to do. When I die the e-books on Amazon Kindle will vanish as if they were never there in the first place, which they weren‘t.
But I don‘t have storage space. Susie has some storage space next to her studio in Marshall. I hope to put the photography books there and to sell them on an on line photography website. But I don‘t know what to do with the rest of the books.
But the even greater problem that looms over me is the problem that every old person in the USA who has been collecting all his life has. I bought these books and became attached to them. Some I read and almost all the rest of them I would like to read although I am running out of time and couldn‘t possibly read all of them if I read eight hours a day until I die, even speedreading, as I did as a kid, reading all of T.S. Eliot‘s very dense poems and plays in one evening, and getting nothing out of them.
The real problem is life and death. The real problem is that like everyone else I am one of the living dead. Or, I am quite alive right now as we all are, but in the long stretch of eons of years, billions of years up to now, I wasn‘t here at all. For the next billions of years I won‘t be here, either. For most of time I am non existent or among the dead. Right now, briefly, I am among the living dead but very soon I‘ll be among the dead dead. That is the problem.
And my books are the least of the problem. The problem is that I am going to die and everything I care about: books, photographs, paintings, all my memories and finally all the memories of me, everything will vanish as if I were never here to begin with. Of course the same is true of my parents whose papers I am briefly responsible for, and my children, and my grandchildren, everyone I care about.
Holding onto my books and realizing that I have to let them go is only the first step in letting go of everything else, of life itself, and meaning, everything.
So I should just let the books go as the first step in letting go of life, of everything that has meaning to me.
But a half hour thinking about it is all I can stand and then I shove books and death and everything else away and go on with my day.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 