Books, books, too many bloody books
If you haven't already heard me say this, you will at some point: I love moving because it forces me to get rid of crap. I am a pack rat through-and-through, both in nature and in nuture. But there's this other side of me that threatens to overtake my pack-rattiness, the side that loves simplicity, the joy of having less stuff to stress over, worry about, locate and store, clean and maintain and at some stage, throw out. I can always find a way to justify keeping things (an old movie stub? But I need to remember the exact date and time of the showing! Better keep that. That old scrap of paper with possible university choices from November 2002? It's fun to look back on that, so best not throw that out. Those old jeans with holes around the back pockets? But I loved them so very much, so I'll keep them until I figure out an inventive use for them. Maybe I could make a hat . . . ). Moving puts a price and a weight on my stuff, and being both stingy and lazy, unless I honestly can justify something in both its moving weight and cost, out it goes. In the haste and hurry that always accompanies migration, I don't have time to baby my emotional attachments to objects, nor the time to come up with creative reasons why I should keep that fourth copy of a plane itinerary from June 1998.
Having moved across the Pacific three times so far in my life, I am capable of bringing myself to part with most things if I have to. I'm even at the point where I could part with photos and old diaries. No, I don't want to, but if I had to, I could. All that crap has been sitting in boxes untouched for god-knows how many years. Occasionally I've gone through it with pleasant nostalgia, with the end result that I waste an afternoon and come away questioning the validity of my own memories (I don't remember ever owning that shirt!). And while I'm thankful that I don't have my mother's unfortunate affliction (the one that causes immediate depression and a feeling that life used to be so better than it is now) whenever old photos are viewed, the 'reward' of occasionally revisiting unimportant things isn't enough to justify the space and time they require.
Strangely, I haven't quite reached this point with my books. I like holding on to the books I've read and enjoyed, and I like being able to look at them on a daily basis, even if it's only a passing glance in a hallway. With approximately 890 books, carrying around these books is no small problem. A majority of these books are in storage in Australia, with the remainder here in DC and in boxes at my parents' place in NJ. Clearly I'm not reading and re-reading these books on a regular basis. But the idea of parting with them, of resigning myself to permanently not have them on hand for immediate viewing, is too scary to contemplate. So I keep them, packed neatly into cardboard boxes, in multiple locations around the world, unwilling and unable to pass them on to someone else, but jaded by the constant hassle of looking after these silly bits of dead tree.
I don't know whether it's just age, or if I really am moving left-wards, away from the materialism and consumption I grew up with -- or a combination of both -- but I find myself more amenable to not having the actual books around me. Truly, the valuable part of any book is not the paper it's written on, but what's written on the paper. If I could find a way of keeping this information close by, in an easily accessible format in a small form, surely that would be perfect?
When e-books first came out, I hated the concept. The damn reader was too big and yet the screen too small, the contrast was either too much or too little, impossible to read in a dark room but couldn't be read within 14 years of sunlight for the glare, battery life of approximately 3 pages, and the indignity of paying for the reader as well as the books themselves . . . just really a whole lot of 'not the same as a book'. Now, I find myself more comfortable with the concept, partly because the technology has gotten better, but also because I find myself wanting intellectual goods without the accompanying physical goods. A e-book reader, along the lines of a Kindle, would be awesome in so many ways: I could carry around multiple 'books' on the metro, reading whatever strikes my fancy at that moment, without having to weigh myself down (in case you haven't noticed, books aren't light). I would no longer be consuming vast amounts of virgin and/or non-renewable forest. Books can be stored digitally, so I can keep my silly books without really having to 'keep' them (think of how many books could fit on a single 250GB hard drive!). I could be part of a system that encourages independent publishers, or even independent writers (what a concept!), by not relying on the distribution networks of the major publishers. People can read and write books because they're good, not because the content is mindless enough to appear on the NYT best-seller list (a misnomer if there ever was one!).
It's a great concept for going forward, but what of the books I've already amassed? The idea of slicing them up and scanning them in doesn't appeal for multitude of reasons, not least because it violates my almost religious reverence for 'the book', but also because the time -- god the time -- it would take to individually scan each piece of paper, once for each side, combining each scan into a single file, ensure that the pages are in order, and then transfer them to the electronic book reader. And slicing them up in pieces . . . I'd vote Republican before I ever took a knife to my precious books. I just can't slice up my books. I won't even dog ear them. I abhor (and I don't mean that word casually) the wear that occurred to the sides of books once you've carried them around in a bag. And those scratches on the cover of glossy books that you can see when you hold them at an angle in the light.
Obviously, there's an attachment I have to the physical form of a book that I don't have towards the digital form of a book. I want to get rid of the attachment, but I can't figure out a way to do so without actually disturbing that very attachment. The sensible part of me wants to be sensible, while the dumb part of me is too stupid to notice. I guess what I really want to do is dispose of the dead body without waking it up, and I can't figure out a way to do that. Maybe there's a book that'll help with that . . .
Having moved across the Pacific three times so far in my life, I am capable of bringing myself to part with most things if I have to. I'm even at the point where I could part with photos and old diaries. No, I don't want to, but if I had to, I could. All that crap has been sitting in boxes untouched for god-knows how many years. Occasionally I've gone through it with pleasant nostalgia, with the end result that I waste an afternoon and come away questioning the validity of my own memories (I don't remember ever owning that shirt!). And while I'm thankful that I don't have my mother's unfortunate affliction (the one that causes immediate depression and a feeling that life used to be so better than it is now) whenever old photos are viewed, the 'reward' of occasionally revisiting unimportant things isn't enough to justify the space and time they require.
Strangely, I haven't quite reached this point with my books. I like holding on to the books I've read and enjoyed, and I like being able to look at them on a daily basis, even if it's only a passing glance in a hallway. With approximately 890 books, carrying around these books is no small problem. A majority of these books are in storage in Australia, with the remainder here in DC and in boxes at my parents' place in NJ. Clearly I'm not reading and re-reading these books on a regular basis. But the idea of parting with them, of resigning myself to permanently not have them on hand for immediate viewing, is too scary to contemplate. So I keep them, packed neatly into cardboard boxes, in multiple locations around the world, unwilling and unable to pass them on to someone else, but jaded by the constant hassle of looking after these silly bits of dead tree.
I don't know whether it's just age, or if I really am moving left-wards, away from the materialism and consumption I grew up with -- or a combination of both -- but I find myself more amenable to not having the actual books around me. Truly, the valuable part of any book is not the paper it's written on, but what's written on the paper. If I could find a way of keeping this information close by, in an easily accessible format in a small form, surely that would be perfect?
When e-books first came out, I hated the concept. The damn reader was too big and yet the screen too small, the contrast was either too much or too little, impossible to read in a dark room but couldn't be read within 14 years of sunlight for the glare, battery life of approximately 3 pages, and the indignity of paying for the reader as well as the books themselves . . . just really a whole lot of 'not the same as a book'. Now, I find myself more comfortable with the concept, partly because the technology has gotten better, but also because I find myself wanting intellectual goods without the accompanying physical goods. A e-book reader, along the lines of a Kindle, would be awesome in so many ways: I could carry around multiple 'books' on the metro, reading whatever strikes my fancy at that moment, without having to weigh myself down (in case you haven't noticed, books aren't light). I would no longer be consuming vast amounts of virgin and/or non-renewable forest. Books can be stored digitally, so I can keep my silly books without really having to 'keep' them (think of how many books could fit on a single 250GB hard drive!). I could be part of a system that encourages independent publishers, or even independent writers (what a concept!), by not relying on the distribution networks of the major publishers. People can read and write books because they're good, not because the content is mindless enough to appear on the NYT best-seller list (a misnomer if there ever was one!).
It's a great concept for going forward, but what of the books I've already amassed? The idea of slicing them up and scanning them in doesn't appeal for multitude of reasons, not least because it violates my almost religious reverence for 'the book', but also because the time -- god the time -- it would take to individually scan each piece of paper, once for each side, combining each scan into a single file, ensure that the pages are in order, and then transfer them to the electronic book reader. And slicing them up in pieces . . . I'd vote Republican before I ever took a knife to my precious books. I just can't slice up my books. I won't even dog ear them. I abhor (and I don't mean that word casually) the wear that occurred to the sides of books once you've carried them around in a bag. And those scratches on the cover of glossy books that you can see when you hold them at an angle in the light.
Obviously, there's an attachment I have to the physical form of a book that I don't have towards the digital form of a book. I want to get rid of the attachment, but I can't figure out a way to do so without actually disturbing that very attachment. The sensible part of me wants to be sensible, while the dumb part of me is too stupid to notice. I guess what I really want to do is dispose of the dead body without waking it up, and I can't figure out a way to do that. Maybe there's a book that'll help with that . . .