Every March I get rid of unnecessary books. I hate what this ritual implies.
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Spring hasn't arrived yet, but in an effort to erase the memories of wintertime, I've begun my annual process of sorting through the vast amount of books, movies, magazines, and other knickknacks that fill every corner of my home each year.
When I say “every nook and cranny,” please take it the same way Trump supporters take the president’s various statements: seriously, but not literally.
In the cozy but cluttered space of my home office, for example, books are scattered everywhere: on my desk, on the floor, on the seat of a chair that was originally intended for reading, not for storing books. And here they are: Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories, Samuel Lipman’s Controversies on Music, Controversies on Culture, a biography of Orson Welles. Admittedly, it’s a pretty random selection, but isn’t that what a pile of books looks like? Moreover, such piles have a habit of gathering themselves together again, as Shirley Jackson knew when she wrote of spring cleaning her toy-cluttered home in Life Among the Savages: “It turns out that although we can live quite comfortably without little wheels on things, new little wheels appear almost instantly.”
My office also has several tall bookshelves, but their impressive height hasn’t stopped me from stacking them with bulky books. Hopefully I won’t have to rush to books like Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science-Fiction Movies of the Fifties, The Complete Lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein II, or a collection of dance reviews from The New York Times, because I’m not sure I can reach any of them without risking injury at this point.
Perhaps the accumulation of books in a writer’s workspace is justifiable, but that doesn’t explain the situation in the rest of my home. Directly across from my office, near the entryway, sits an elegant Shaker-style cabinet made of sturdy maple and stained a pleasant green—a stunning piece custom-made by a talented cabinetmaker in Connecticut. You’d expect such a prized possession to hold something meaningful, but when I open its long, narrow doors, I find only more evidence of my wasteful hoarding: books that lack sufficient personal or sentimental value to warrant a place on my actual bookshelves, piles of books I reviewed months or years ago, and free copies of magazines to which I contributed. What would the Shakers do with such valuable space for what might be called overflow?
Fortunately, the weariness with which I look at this plethora of media is matched by the pleasure I take in culling it each spring. It’s as if the changing sunlight at this time of year sheds new light on the intemperate carelessness of my acquisition of so much. I ask myself: What possessed me to buy a book about sailing? Did I really need a 4K edition of Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much when I already had the DVD? Why did I think I’d have time to read (and presumably write about) Adlai Stevenson’s speeches? After all, I’m not crazy, and I’ve never been an Adlai fan.
So, with an insight I lack the rest of the year, I move from room to room, looking for things I can throw away, donate, or sell for a small amount (more on that later). I get a great deal of satisfaction from getting rid of book reviews,
Sourse: theamericanconservative.com
