Two months since my last blog entry and we’ve STILL not moved house. It’s a process I’m really not enjoying - greedy middlemen waiting on greedy middlemen waiting on greedy middlemen makes for an unbearable experience - and we’re not even at the packing-everything-up stage. We’re at the chasing-solicitors-I’m-paying-to-chase-others stage. I hope to Dickens we’re closer to completion than Christmas, but I’m not holding my breath.
The missus has asked me, though, on more than one occasion, if I oughtn’t to get rid of some of my books in preparation for the move.
Yeah, I know.
I’ve looked over the spines and selected the ones I can part with. The sum of that inventory is the same as the odds of my spontaneous combustion whilst dueting with Dua Lipa.
I will not be giving any books away.
Every book I own is a memory. Our Kind of Traitor reminds me of St Albans, where I bought it, and then my recuperation after my hit and run in north London, on whose painkillers and sofabeds I convalesced whilst reading it. That dog-eared copy of Picture of Dorian Grey reminds me of a choppy ferry crossing between Spanish islands in 1997 when I was still convinced by my own literary pedigree. The Handmaid’s Tale is a Sussex balcony and a new pair of reading glasses. The Game of Thrones books are Santa Maria before my various skin conditions meant I had to hide from sunlight like a shit Dracula. Flowers for Algernon is the Piccadilly line tube journey to my MA class on Tuesdays in the mid-noughts. The Outsiders is a flight back from Greece when the turbulence engendered in me a lifetime fear of flying.
And so it goes.
My memory is terrible. I get lost walking back from the supermarket. Every time I try to upload a new blog entry I have to relearn how from scratch. There might be a medical reason for this, I don’t know, but people always seem to remember things I’ve done or places I’ve been better than I do. But books are tangible evidence that I’ve existed. I often don’t remember the specifics of the fictions I’ve read, but I remember the factual places I’ve sat and consumed them, the feelings they created. Throwing away those books would be like deleting parts of myself and, in many ways, I have a better relationship with said books than I do other humans. Each one is a little history, like a scar, a gouged mark on a prisoner’s wall.
I’m pretty sure that, if I gifted all my books away, my very lifeblood would evaporate and, each book being a potent part of myself, I’d drop dead at the charity shop’s exit if I unloaded the lot of them.
I don’t hoard anything else. I own one or two pairs of shoes at a time. I’ve used the same backpack for work and shopping trips for seven years. But books I will gladly sequester until they fall on me in the night and crush me to a wheezing, bleeding death.
More than that though, I’m a writer - there, I came out at last - and books are a constant resource and reference it would be folly to throw. They bring comfort during frustrating times, a wall of reminiscence to remind me how others do it.
I shall not be getting rid of any of my books. To do so would be to lose potency and impetus. This is a fact. Probably.
The opposite will be happening. I shall definitely be buying more.
Opmerkingen