I have an initial 30-ODD volumes waiting for Billy to collect.
Billy is a recently made friend, a certified genius who at age 12 is already doing college work. A prodigious reader herself, she likes to spread the reading virus and has been calling out for books that can be spared for an open library run by an old man.
Billy, the old man, and the library themselves make for a story that ought to be told, and told separately. Meantime, this one, to which they are, simply but to my infinite relief, incidental, is about my own effort to simplify and lighten this life that I’ve been living all these 68 years.
There are fewer greater sorrows for me than parting with books; they are a life’s resource, more relied upon than anything else for instruction and inspiration. But as a life-saving measure too, the parting just has to be endured: my wife and I are gasping for breathing space.
Subtracting those decided for Billy, I count a thousand volumes yet on my shelves and off-on tables, ledges and any other surfaces than can hold them without much getting in the way.
Books scarcely wear out, and not at all in my care; indeed, I’ve meant for them to keep forever—well, until life’s tide of accumulation, of which the bulk in my case is books, begins to swamp our little condominium nest. In fact before we downsized to condominium living, I already had parted with a heartbreaking fifteen-hundred volumes.
With other things I’ve never had a problem. Clothes and shoes I discard absolutely without emotion; in fact I do it rather methodically: I retire a piece or a pair as I acquire a new one. Even trophies, plaques, certificates and other such tokens haven’t the slightest hold on me; they all go into the first accessible bin, along with the dubious feat or honor they symbolize, thus leaving myself free from their haunting.
Natural process
With books, at any rate, I seem to have become more practical and less emotional, and doubtless that has much to do with the natural process of getting on. My choices for reading must have become set in the subconscious by now; I read little new fiction and prefer to reread old favorites. Nonfiction —biographies and histories mostly—comprises my new readings almost exclusively.
Now and then I inventory my books to decide what to keep, especially what I’m likely to keep going back to, for reference, say. And to preserve the cozy comfort of our domestic confines, I force myself to choose, except in truly compelling cases, only one or two from the works of favorite writers.
To be sure, books are but one species of occupant targeted for dislodging, and theirs is a mere physical case of simplifying and lightening life; they only take space. Life at this stage, I feel, could also use some refreshing, in which case another sort of reordering is called for.
Finally, my time is mine, more than less, pledged no longer to feeding a family and building a career, among other moral and professional responsibilities. Now I can play the guitar more and draw more or even begin to paint without worrying about the time that would be taken away from my living.
In that one regard alone I’m nothing like Enoch Powell, the late Conservative Member of the British Parliament I have greatly admired just reading about, except for that one precise instance where he seemed rather overinsistent on being his brilliant, unique-thinking self. Observed by The Times of London to have been “apparently very musical” when he was young—he played the clarinet—he was asked why he rarely even listened to music. “I don’t like things which interfere with one’s heart strings,” he was quoted replying. “It doesn’t do to awaken longings that can’t be fulfilled.”
There lies my distinct, great advantage over Mr. Powell: being neither promising at anything when young nor famous for anything when old, I can play the guitar silly, draw silly, even write silly. I absolutely have no idea what the market for silly is like, but again what do I care? I just want to feel somewhat renewed. Surely at my age that’s not at all silly.