Last week I was helping a friend move from one office space to another. One of the things we discussed for a while, before I left her alone to do all the hard work, was why it is so hard to get rid of books. It was the associations, she surmised (I’m paraphrasing). This is a book from graduate school and brings back all of those memories. A good ex gave me this book. A bad ex gave me that one.
Right away I could see books having good mojo or bad vibes — and I could think of specific books in my life that are all but impossible to discard. Just acknowledging their existence took some of the weight off my shoulders, as if I had been carrying all of these books along with everything else.
I also began to imagine a book as an octopus, with tentacles reaching out in curious and unexpected directions. No, wait! The book as a spider at the center of an elaborate web, connecting times and places and snaring the reader whenever they pick it up or even look at it. Or think of it. If you’re careful you can stay clear. But if you forget, and stumble into it, you’re stuck as the housefly that will become Charlotte’s breakfast.
Those of us who have relationships with books (in particular and in general) probably have them because of these associations, and we don’t find this a new or unusual concept. Books linger in our memories because they were from that literature class we liked, or from the class with the teacher we had a crush on. We chose books because of who else was reading them, of how they looked, or how they felt in our hands. Maybe we picked up a book from our grandmother’s attic or our father’s bookshelf and felt, when we read it, that we were entering their world for a while and doing, perhaps, a bit of time travel. Or someone gave us a book — as a birthday gift, as a prize, as a going-away present — and we hold on to it to maintain that connection and those memories.
Books like this are more to us than just paper on a shelf, and we may even entertain the notion that the relationship between us and the books is a two-way street: maybe they feel connected to us, too, and are grateful to be well housed and read. (If this seems like a bizarre concept to you, just consider it the next time you accuse your computer or your cell phone of conspiring against you in your time of need.)
Of course, the older we get and the longer we hang on to our books, the deeper those relationships can become. We can also create relationships with new copies of the old books, if we haven’t hung on to the original specimens we remember from childhood, or that summer in Germany, or the vacation at the beach. We might want to have our own copy of the book we checked out from the public library over and over again — and each time we open it we remember all of those visits to the library. We’re happily stuck to these books (and they to us).
Right now I’m stuck to quite a few books. The number, which I have many reasons for not wanting to calculate, may well be in the thousands. A few days ago I made a rare trip to the basement to look for a particular book — which I didn’t think I’d find, and I didn’t — and after going through several cardboard boxes I was reminded of all those books I’m stuck to that I don’t even visit. They don’t have good living conditions by any means, and no one enjoys them. You would think that it would be easy to just get rid of them all, since I’m not looking at them anyway. But I’m still stuck.
I’m planning to move in a few more years, and part of the plan involves sort of an un-sticking process with the items that, honestly, won’t have a place in the new house. I really have about three houses’ worth of things in the current house, and the thought of getting rid of twice as many things as I’m going to keep is rather panic-inducing. But I can’t take it all with me.
Perhaps I can work out an equation to measure the stickiness of a particular book, and I can eliminate books that fall outside of a certain range. A book I don’t even remember buying, and I have no interest in reading? Stickiness = 0 (Teflon), goes directly to Goodwill. A book that’s so sticky that I feel oppressed by it, under so much emotional obligation that I’m utterly stifled? Stickiness = 10, get a friend to help me negotiate a separation from this toxic relationship. Maybe I can narrow the range to a stickiness value somewhere between 7 and 9. (I can hear several of you laughing already. Just go with it for now, okay? It’s good to have goals.) The remaining books will be the most loved ones, the most special ones, and the ones I’ll open again to use and cherish.
Knitwise….I made progress today. I stopped in at a local thrift store this morning before going grocery shopping. I thought I was safe because I only had a dollar or two in my wallet and the store took only cash. But a sign on the door said, we now accept checks and debit cards, $5 minimum. Okay, fine. Then I started finding things I actually wanted to buy, and my arms were full. After I checked the tags I realized that I was nowhere near $5 — one item I had picked up was only 30 cents — and I took myself out of the checkout line to set the items down and figure out how much money I actually had. For a minute I thought that I might have to buy another armload of items just to get over the $5 mark. Then I realized that I had a bit more money tucked away in a different location in my purse, and if I used some of that I’d be able to pay in cash. I wouldn’t have to buy more yarn after all. And I only bought two more books.
Chocolate Sheep 