More Vanishing Library
Blogging has been slow because I have been sitting cross-legged at the base of my bookshelves reliving my life.
I once owned nearly 3000 books… how vain of me to know the number! Several moves and one divorce separated me from many of them and I have, during the 25 years of my second marriage, regularly lugged more of them to second hand book stores to exchange them, as Kathleen has suggested, for some more solid sort of sustenance: A dinner out, or a bottle of decent brandy.
Throughout it all I clung to a decreasing circle of literary and philosophical friends too important to part with. Sitting on the floor, sorting though these books unceremoniously dragged from their shelves, has been like leafing through old photo albums of my life.
Russell’s "The Philosophy of Leibniz." I sat up all night reading it, too excited to sleep; Collingwood’s "The Principles of Art." Pretty much where I ended up in esthetics and a fine analysis of the role of imagination in consciousness; Kant’s "Critique of Pure Reason." I was once tortured in graduate school by having to outline the whole damn thing and subsequently tortured my own students the same way.
Hours have slipped by while I ignored work and forgot blogging.
I have decided to keep only these: Hume’s "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion." and a beautiful edition of Plato. Although I doubt I’ll ever slog through the ‘Parmenides’ again I’ll certainly return to the charming Socratic dialogues on friendship or love. It's not philosophy in the strict academic sense but I’ll keep the Fagles translation of the Iliad. (I haven’t seen the movie but I have read the book.) Nietzsche’s "Birth of Tragedy" and "Geneology of Morals" remain with me.
I have found that the trick to dispossessing myself of a library is to recognize that I no longer have the intellectual "sitzfleish" for the work I once promised myself I would do. Old age is neither for sissies nor the unrealistic.
