Winter Settling Moon II
One bookcase almost filled with its new content: Latin texts, texts about Latin and Greek authors, ancient history. That may fill it up. I had wanted to fit mythology and religious studies on that shelf, too, but that’s part of the fun of organizing. Bunching books together in new ways, ways that might spark new thinking.
Another example is the United States section where I’m putting everything I have that touches on any aspect, from the geological to the theological, of the U.S. experience. American identity, the American landscape, regionalism and American literature are especially interesting to me.
Art books will fill up many shelving units but that’s a category that already had its own section of my library. In addition to the Latin and my own work, I hope to spend much more time with this broad subject, focusing initially on aesthetics. Aesthetics, or the philosophy of art, was not a part of the MIA docent program education. One question in particular fascinates me: what is art? Said another way, how do you know art when you see it?
Right now I’m carving out a bookshelf for poetry. When I unboxed the books, I put them up with little regard for their content. Now I’m moving books from the bookcases and the floor into intellectual families according to my own interests. That means taking books off of bookcases, leaving some them there, then carrying others to the bookcase. Sounds like a lot of shuffling around and it is, but the process gets easier the more I do it because I recognize where small caches of, say, poetry are.
Of course there are, too, all those file boxes. Then, the art.
