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Ani DiFranco has this song called “Soft Shoulder” from her album To The Teeth. I love that song. The first verse is perpetually stuck in my head:
I don’t keep much stuff around
I value my portability
but I will say that I have saved
every letter you ever wrote to me
I want to be able to value my portability. I’ve lived in four different cities and seven different apartments in the last six years, and sometimes I wish that moving was as easy as filling up a backpack and a little satchel and walking to the next destination. That’s what I imagine Ani doing.
I’m no pack rat, but I do have a few boxes of letters, postcards, ticket stubs, mementos, school work, photos, and Xerox copies of interesting articles. And books. I’m not a collector — I think I have less than 150 books — but the books take up the most space each time I move.
Half of the books I own are still in boxes in California. I have a routine of going through my boxes of papers a couple times a year and throwing a way a little more stuff each time. But books I almost never get rid of, even though I haven’t read more than half of the books I own.
Books are the items most standing in the way of my imagined life of portability. Yet, even when I’m in my annual cleaning mode, I never consider weeding through them. Why is that?
The New York Times has a great post on this very problem. David Matthews says:
A lot of this stuff can go. If I’m being honest, some of it is on my shelf because I like the idea of it being on my shelf. Things I will never, ever read: The biography of Willem de Kooning. Ditto the 600 pages devoted to Wittgenstein’s life and thought. Malraux’s “The Voices of Silence” will remain mute, its spine un-cracked, the book’s presence meant to imply to anyone perusing my “library” that I’m a man of serious ideas and scholarship.
I think that’s part of my problem. I like to keep books around for show. I think my 2010 resolution should be to read all the books I own that I haven’t yet read. And if by 2011 I don’t read them, they have to go. Portability, here I come.
I run into this problem every time I move, which, as a college student, is about once a semester. I tend to accrue books at a much faster rate than I read them, and so many books on my shelves I haven’t read yet, though I always feel kind of bad about it. But books are pretty much the one thing I wouldn’t even consider getting rid of, no matter how heavy those boxes get.
Oooh do I feel your pain. It’s impossible though. And as much as I say “I’ll never read that,” every time I think about weeding out my collection, I think I might someday… maybe… in another world… actually possibly pick those strange books up.
When you get old, or maybe before, you’ll want to do something about all those books. My husband and I have a lifetime’s worth and it won’t be long until we begin to collect Social Security. We decided not to be “portable” people long ago because of the preciousness of our books, but even with that dedication, there comes a point where space just runs out. We’ve weeded out a lot of the casual fiction, and kept the keepers and reference books. Still, it’s a problem.
Our solution has been to buy and stock Kindles. I know, I know, but it has given us a new lease on the book-loving life. All the stuff about how books smell aside, the technology defines portable. Now, if we could just figure out how to leave our electronic collections to whichever grandchild who turns out to be a reader.
If I could I would have a house where every available space was lined with floor to ceiling bookshelves. There’s just something about books…
I do download some Kindle books to my iTouch though.
You know, I don’t think it’s too bad to have books around just for show. Perhaps pretentious and deceptive, but at least it is a positive projection of who you think you are. For some people it’s the sports car or the latest gadget, and you can bet they aren’t saying ‘Oh, I don’t really use my Porsche, I ought to get rid of it.’