So Many Books…

The office renovation begins Monday.

Radiant heated floors, they said. Gentle warmth rising from beneath, easing sore joints and smoothing the edges of winter. But before one can bask in such domestic beatitude, one must first dismantle one's life. Or in my case, one's library.

This weekend, we tore up my ground floor office; or rather, it tore me up. My knees are filing a formal complaint. My back has stopped speaking to me. And the books, dear God, the books, multiplied like loaves and fishes the moment I touched a shelf. I swear I turned around once and there were more of them. Heavy ones. Tomes. Compendiums. Hardcovers with medieval guilt bindings.

Some people collect stamps or sea glass or lovers. I guess I collect books. Even the ones I’ve read. Even the ones I’ll never read again. Even the ones I bought knowing I’d never read them but needed them on the shelf to say something about me to someone, probably me.

Oddly enough, I heard a story this week about a man who returned to UCLA to visit his old mentor. The professor's office, once a womb of books, shelves from floor to ceiling, was bare. Empty walls. Not a spine in sight. When asked what had happened, the old scholar tapped his temple and said, “They’re all here.” The story stayed with me and I turned to my overflowing shelves.

I wonder if I’m moving toward that realization too. Perhaps the synaptic pathways are finally paved with literature. Perhaps I've become the library. Or perhaps I’m just too old and tired to haul another bloody box of C. G. Jung to the garage.

Years ago, when we moved north in pursuit of simplicity (oh, the irony), I held a book Potlatch. Family, friends, colleagues, even analysands were invited to my sacred shelves. Take what you like, I said. Go forth and read. It felt generous, ancestral, noble even. Until we moved back and my shelves stood there like abandoned altars, missing their saints. I mourned them all. The slim volumes of poetry, the dog-eared Jung, the out-of-print fairy tale collections with mystical woodcut covers, the serial mysteries lined up like criminals behind the one-way glass.

Fifteen years later, the books have mysteriously crept back like prodigal children. The shelves are full once more, overflowing. Books two rows deep. Books stacked sideways. Books that required a six-pronged pulley system and a minor act of contrition just to move out of the way for the contractor.

I tell myself I'm just a kinesthetic learner with a photographic memory. That reading on a screen is like eating soup with a fork. Nothing sticks. But hand me a book, and I’ll remember: about 30 pages in, halfway down the left page, there was that line that changed me. “Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”

Still, it might be time for another letting go. A gentler Potlatch. Maybe a little Free Library at the end of the lane? A “Book Adoption Fair” with tea and biscuits and a strict no-judgment policy? ("Yes, that is a signed copy of The Drama of the Gifted Child. No, I don’t want to talk about it.") Perhaps a blind date with a book basket? Where guests choose a title wrapped in brown paper, with only three words for guidance: “Beware the Goat.”

My mother-in-law gets the annual hardcover picks from book club, with one rule: read, enjoy, and pass it on. Once, I used a book embosser to stamp my name in every volume like a Victorian dowager. It was part ownership, part curse. A hex of guilt for those who dared borrow and not return. But I’ve softened. The obsessive-compulsive librarian in me is mellowing. Or maybe it’s just that my knees can no longer bend to shelve with precision.

So here I am. A book lover in her cronedom with radiant floors on the horizon and a spine (mine, not the books') in questionable condition. Do I reshelve all the books or make a concerted effort to cull?

Any takers for a lightly foxed copy of Women Who Run with the Wolves with a bookmark made from a grocery receipt from 2003? Or how about The Collected Works of C.G. Jung—volume 12 only, but spiritually significant and filled with notations from a Jungian-in-training? Or how about the Coyote chewed personalized copy of The Underpainter? (“To a dog with great ‘taste’ in literature, Jane Urquhart, 1997).

Come by next week. I’ll be in a lawn chair beside a box labeled Stories That Saved Me. Take one, take two. The first is free. The second costs you nothing, only this: that you read it with reverence, pass it on with love, and remember that in a world tearing itself apart, a good book is still a thread strong enough to stitch something back together.

And if you forget the title later, that’s all right. Just remember this: about 30 pages in, halfway down the page, on the left, something true was waiting for you.