Getting Rid of Too Many Books: Ouch

What Enough Is

All my life I’ve been accumulating books. In making this move from Downtown Brooklyn to Flatbush Brooklyn, I am letting go of great armfuls, one after another, just out on the stoop and look the other way.

How am I doing it?! I’ve been wanting to for some time but couldn’t. Here’s the prosecution’s argument: Storing these books in one’s home gives up a ton of square footage, and mostly they just sit there, spine out, idle as a stone. The defense is also strong though; it’s that when I try to get rid of them I have a good look and end up finding them curious, generative, and/or nostalgic such that they are no longer stones at all. They are almost living beings. The defense admits and proclaims, I only read my books when I am trying to get rid of them. The defense insists that this is still reading them, just erratically and with aggression alternating with tenderness.

This time I’ve been ruthless, I’ve decimated. I want to live, not store books just because they remind me of my past studies and past selves. Or just because I’d like to be the sort of person who could read, say, a giant biography of Marcus Aurelius, knowing well that at this moment in my life and for the foreseeable, I am not. I was that way, but I’m not today. I put it out on the stoop and I felt it when it walked away. Maybe like I’m made of layers of masking tape and someone just stripped one away. What’s wrong with being smaller? It won’t hurt forever.

Gosh it’s a few days since I wrote the above and more than a hundred books later. As predicted in my last letter, I’m writing this from sunny Flatbush. The old place still has stuff, the new place is stuffed with boxes.

Now it’s days more later and I’m holding back symphonies of misery with the sheer power of my mind. I had an interaction that hurt my feelings. I’m tired of my feelings. I’m feeling like Bugs Bunny when his animator’s pencil eraser removes everything around him. So much white space. The eraser even threatens him. The character’s catchphrase is, “What’s up, Doc?” Now I ask it of myself. That’s me, I’m Dr Hecht, thus Doc is my most often assigned of Snow White’s seven friends. Not that I’m not Grumpy and Sleepy — I most certainly am, but there’s often no other doc around. In my version, today, there’d have to be Achy, Ragey and Poverty.

[When he grows up we’ll call him Povert, but for now he’s just little Poverty.] See? I’ve dropped the plot. It’s alright. I’m not Bug’s Bunny, and can’t myself be erased, though I may feel it. But still the question is, “What’s up, Doc?” And the answer is, “The jig.”

Will this happen to you if you let your books go? No. This was supposed to be an essay about the good part of giving away your books. The keep-the-books Defense says, “It is a sad and failing scholar who has to see her books go before that sadder day when her books have to see her go.” In a smaller world. In a bigger house. Life would have been easier on us. The Prosecution says, “No.” The Prosecution says, “You had the books for several projects that are either finished or unlikely to ever be restarted. You can’t be responsible for carrying them around just because it took effort to gather them.” The Prosecution says, “Even if they are rare, you can gather them together again if you ever actually want them.” The Prosecution knows my weakness and gets it named. The Prosecution knows the damage and feels a bit ashamed. The Prosecution doesn’t want the books or to do anymore hard work.

Were the books holding more than my Aristotle? I think Yes, not versions of myself as I’d feared, not loss but lost, and a part of me I don’t know if I can trust is a bit relieved. It knows I don’t feel like reading them.

One nice thing about our new place is that you see more sky—the other houses are low. I’m a lot sadder then when I started this move, and I kept it together for a week or so, but sometimes there is too much insult added to the injury and vice versa.

I’m still here.

September twilight sweetens the sky and tips into darkness. From inside, low in the house with lots of windows the darkness comes as coffee overflowing its cup. You’re not alone, Say I, trying to be of aid to you, a host clocked in the head still offering apéritif. Says the Prosecution, No, not alone, you’re surrounded by fools and the angry. Roars the Defense, Don’t forget the profoundly disappointed. Moreover, you’re less than surrounded. Moreover you are less than surrounded. Moreover we have lost sight of what we were after.

Lost first is the only way to be found. It is still a disaster.

We had to live low for the old dog who no longer does many stairs. Onward to the next adventure in the architecture of a spark which the Buddha says isn’t even a self but which is at least a spark, I think, a spark of being as well as the more obvious spark of wanting. You can talk about a soul. What is important here Doc, is not what’s up. It’s what’s down the rabbit hole.

Relatable? A little too much this time? Yes. And I should be welcoming my new subscribers free and especially paid— thank you so much, you’re the light of my torch— and really anyone here reading. Thanks for coming. I’ll cheer up next time.

love,

Jennifer