Beltane Summer Moon
Books. Down to here, down to there, down to where the shelves stop growing at the floor. Ah, my pleasure, my curse. Books. I don’t love books, though you’d be hard pressed to guess that if you looked at the lower level of our house. What I love is in books: knowledge, far away places, imagined worlds, the history of whole nations and peoples, the latest consensus on water or global warming or spirituality. Yet now I have to prune and, oddly, I’m looking forward to it.
I’ve collected books over the years as various projects have sprouted, become possibility. Some involved writing, but many, too, involved coming to understand some aspect of the world or a particular country’s literature or art. Or religion. Or political philosophy. Or just plain philosophy. The Enlightenment. Celtic history and myth. Northern European mythology. Fairy tales. Poetry. The Middle Ages. The Renaissance. Ovid.
It’s no subtle insight to say I have gone too far in my purchases, though if I had a Victorian library with plenty of shelf space, I’d keep them all. Just in case. This book buying habit started long ago, perhaps when I first bought all the James Bond novels in paperback so I could read through them. I was in junior high.
Since then if I develop an enthusiasm, my first instinct is to collect books about it. And I’ve been at it a long time. As a rough estimate, I have 308 linear feet of book shelves. You might call them my large array, my antenna seeking out the pattern in messages from the past, about the future and from the minds of artists of all ages and types.
This post is to aid in my deacquisition process. First off the middle ages. Then, the humid east gardening books, almost all of my books related to the bible and spirituality. All fiction save for the classics. My books related to psychotherapy, Islam, Japan. Books relating to political science and political philosophy. Egypt. Almost all of the DVD’s. All of the teaching company courses. Most books on magic. Certain art books like all those related to native american art, perhaps some of the very heavy coffee table books. All of my notes for touring at the MIA. All of my notes for my book on the ecological history of Lake Superior. Perhaps most of the books gathered for that project.
Oh. My. This. Will be hard and will be freeing. Must be done. Here we go.
