At my day job, we are shifting offices, or at least we are planning to within the next year or so. My shared space, with three full-height bookshelves, will be repalced by a single office of my own, albeit one with far less square footage. I recently got to see a video of the typical new office space, and it’s barely more than a closet, and, so I am told, there will be a single book case inside, just half height.
If I do the math right, I have more than six hundred books, plus an additional ten linear fet of files in file boxes, plus maybe half again as much in historical materials I use for reaseach and other tasks. Those boxes alone would fill up all the anticipated shelf space I will have. Obviously, something has to give. Much of it may have to return home, but that puts it largely out of reach when I am actually working. What can I keep? How much can stay? And what do I do with the rest? These are questions that plague me.
The result is that I’ve been cleaning and sorting, and this has gone on in several rounds. The first pass was to remove every duplicate book, as well as every book that, if I am honest, I will never look at or read again. This was progress, it did mean removing a couple hundred titles. It also gave me an exuse to clean and organize what was left, until I had a single shelf level deicated too all of my theory books, two for fiction, literature, and essays, two for art books, one for books on writing, and so on. I rather liked how this all worked out.
Even though it was paintful to stack books that I intended to part with, I also felt like I was letting things go, like I was clearing out and making changes. A book, when it comes into your life, changes it even if you don’t read it. It is first and foremost a presence on the shelf, acting at a minimum as a statement that you aspire to be a person who has read and valued that work. If you read it, and you decide to keep it, it expresses, I think, a sense of sentiment or perhaps intellectual obligation, as if the book deserves its space because it helped you think through something. I once had a professor, a little bit unreconstructed hippy, one foot in retirement, with whom I took a small seminar class. There were just four or five students, and we met in their office each friday and, after about an hour of discussions, we would move to a nearby campus restaurant and sit on the terrace and eat lunch together will continuing our conversation. It felt the peak of civilization. And I recall that she once suggested that the books we had on our shelves, like all the things we had in our offices and rooms and bedrooms, were part of our brain, they were part of our cognition. “If you look across the room, and see that thing, and think something in response, isn’t it part of your congitive proces?” This was like nothing I had considered before. It changed me.
By extension, when you discard a book, you are letting go of the part of yourself that needed it, you are, in some way, moving, growing, altering yourself. So even as I grumbled about the lack of space in my future, I experienced an unexpected sense of freedom from the process, a sense of possiblity. And the act of deciding what books to discard was punctuated, at times, by finding duplicates of good books, books that I saw and thought, oh, I know someone will like finding that.
This process however, is not a single-pass thing. As I ordered and re-ordered my shelves, I realized that I still had too many books for the future move, but more than that, I began to grow doubts about some of those that had survived my first pass. I reached out to touch my fingers against the spines—why is this tactile move seemingly enlightening? I don’t know, but there is, perhaps, an emotional quality to making these decisions. As I felt each book, I realized that there were many that sat on my shelf out of obligation rather than admiration. This book is here because I might need to reference it one day. This book is here because it is widely regarded as a key text on such and such topic. This one is here because I put my name in it long ago, this one because it was a gift. And this one I’ve never read, bt what if I need this book some day? It was as if I had turned my shelves into a Victorian china cabinet, filled with plates and bowls and cups that almot never get used, and nick-nacks and vases and serving-wear that is valuable, or might one day be valuable, but that in practical terms just sit there taking up space
The result was another round of introspection, doubt, and guilt. But also, some clarity. Aren’t there books here that I would never part with, books here that mean something more?
A new experiment. What, from each shelf, are the books that must come with me, that must be in my new space? Again, running my hand down the spines on each shelf, it wasn’t hard to find these titles. Some were collections of essays. Some were history books, some art monographs. A surprising number were books of social theory and criticism–I’ve never thought of myself as a theory person, and yet, there’s Fisher and Bejamin and Barthes and bunch of others, somehow on my shelf of personal classics. And now, as I look at the gaps I’ve made I have new thoughts. First, I am saddened at how much I have wrecked my still quite young organization system, so much so that I consider putting everything back the way it was. Second, I look at all the shelves that have spaces where once my favorite titles had sat, and I feel ambivalence about the titles that remain. How many here are due to completeism, or a sense of obligation?
Crap. I left Harvey on the regular theory shelf. I get up, I move it over to the “keepers” shelf, and marvel at another book of theory.
Have I really changed that much?
I once placed a line in a dating app, something to the effect of “valuing the material over the theoretical.” I know, I sound like such a catch, right? But my thinking was to always make my profiles say something about who I was, about my values, my interests, about the part of me that isn’t a face, that is more than a heartbeat and a body. And I remember, once, that I got a random message from someone who had read the profile and reached out because they were mildly twerked by that line, and wanted to challenge me, to demand an explanation of me. I don’t know what I responded, not word for word, but the gist was that I had spent too much time digging through the evidence of blloodshed and harm to have much patience for the kind of theory-spouting performativity that fills so much discourse, both online, and in the academy.
He didn’t block me, but he certainly didn’t continue our conversation.
And now, the books that I want to keep, the books I am putting into my mental suitcase to take with me when I have to move, have a not insignificant number of therory titles.
Some of this must be age. Some of this, I think, must be the crisis, too. To live now, much less to begin to feel some weight of age now, is to try and cut through the endless bullshit of daily life in a time of chaos and anger and spectacle, to try and find the things worth holding onto. I find, more and more, that the process of doing things outweighs the outcomes, that clarifying what I think and what I think I want to do matters as much as the doing. Are my theoretical texts just religious books, spot-gap crutches for a lack of the divine? Perhaps, but what I take from them, what these books seem to actually, actively be saying to me from across the room is that why matters. As much as when, and where, and what, and whom.
And now I am left with two levels of shelf with the books I really need, and the knowledge that, soon enough, I’m going to have to ask myself what I really think about the other titles that remain.
Harbour Fordyce 