The Vanishing Library
In the early days of this blog I posted a piece called "Living Out of The Trunk." It was an account of advice my father gave me on the occasion of my graduation from grade school. He gave me a theatrical trunk with my name painted on it in yellow letters and said that the secret to a happy life was never to own more stuff than I could pack in that trunk; but that whatever I put in it should be the very best, the very highest quality, I could afford.
Through the years I have fallen short of that ideal, but it left a psychological imprint. I am constantly at war with clutter, trying to clean out and throw away what hasn’t been used, or thought about, during a past year or eighteen months.
For years this impulse has been at war with my mother’s book worship, and with a kind of "library vanity." It was not enough to be great readers—as we all were—we had to show the world our word intoxication by wearing our hearts not on our sleeves but on our bookshelves.
During my years in academia I bought and kept books so that I need never go to the college library for research material I might need. Of course this was a vain endeavor.
Moves and life changes have whittled away at the sheer volume of books I have dragged around the country with me, but I am being seduced to follow the example of a former teacher who once gave away all his extensive library on the grounds that he needed only the books he was teaching from each semester. The rest he could get in the library.
I have never gone to that extreme, but I have kept a small core of books on philosophy… original texts, histories, and collections of essays on the theory that I might someday sit down and really tackle Wittgenstein on private language, or Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories.
That modest philosophical library will be the first to go. It represents no more than the archeological remains of a life so far in the past that it hardly seems my life at all, but a life remembered and dimly recounted by someone else.
