Wednesday, July 24, 2013

20130724.0833

As noted in my previous entry, I am in the process of relocating to Stillwater, Oklahoma, to take up a position as Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Oklahoma State University.  The process requires me to do a number of things, including going through the various stuff that has accumulated in the home my lovely, loving wife and I have made together in The Best of the Boroughs and getting rid of those things which do not serve us well.

I have discussed my reading at length, I think, and my stated work as a scholar in the academic humanities on its own suggests that I spend a lot of time buried in texts.  Implied by this, known by those who have been in my home and those who have known me for any length of time, and openly stated here is that my wife and I have quite a few books.  Both of us work with language, and much language is encoded in written and printed texts.  Both of us enjoy reading, and we both began decades before electronic texts were widely available.  So it makes sense that we have had many books--and we are hardly unique in keeping around us the things we like, so that it makes sense that we have held on to a lot of books.

We have fewer of them now, and we are likely to have fewer yet as we move forward in packing for the move.  Many that we have already set out on the curb, and which have already vanished away, are duplicate volumes; both of us have owned copies of a text, and only one of those copies was permitted to remain with us (usually mine, given my greater propensity to produce marginalia).  Many others are the kind that I have taken to purchasing for electronic reading, using the e-reader my beloved wife gave me a while back; my recreational reading, in almost all cases, is done on the little device.  Some are volumes hopelessly out of date and without sentimental value attached to them; I have several books from older generations of my family, and although the understandings they represent are long since invalidated, having the notes of my forebears in their margins serves to connect me to my heritage in a way I value greatly--and those books are staying with me for a long time to come.  Others are not so lucky.

The necessity of paring down the gathering of printed pages is conceded, and relocating offers a good impetus to meet that obligation.  Still, for a person who has not vainly sought to borrow from his books surcease of sorrow, surpassing Poe's most noted narrator in that as in much else, the reduction of the library that has grown up over years of reading is...uncomfortable.  Print itself is shrinking away, and while it will never die out altogether, its decline has had and is having effects that are not necessarily to be encouraged.  Purging volumes from my wife's collection and mine serves in part to promote that decline, even as it is called for by other circumstances.  Too, I like having stuff, and I have less of it now.

No comments:

Post a Comment