The Eternal Sadness of Bookshelves

A friend of mine loaned me two folding bookshelves when I first came back to the High Desert in November 2018. She didn’t have room for them in her tiny rented room. Well, now she’s in a bigger place and wants her bookshelves back.

So I had to unpack the books from these shelves and buy two new bookshelves. In so doing, I reacquainted myself with about 100 books on the shelves that I had forgotten.

There’s the two Richard Ford books I’ve been meaning to read for the last 10 years. There’s the book on Victorian traditions of death that informs mystery writing. There’s the book on Ulysses S Grant. I read 1/3 through that biography before getting distracted.

More. There’s a book of Marina Tsevaena’s poetry translated by a friend of mine, a slim little book I meant to spend an evening with. There’s a novel about my ancestor Robert the Bruce. And a historical biography of a woman who defined the 18th century.

More. A book on Beethoven on his 200th birthday. A book about how to reorganize my life using “Atomic” methods. A book on meditation and mindfulness. Three, actually.

And on and on. I have universal taste in books. I lovingly gazed at a book on how science will be changing in the next twenty years written ten years ago. Only ten more years to read that one before it’s obsolete.

The sadness is knowing that I will never read all these books. It’s one of the reasons I no longer haunt bookstores, which was once my favorite pastime. Whenever I would inevitably come home with four new books, the books on my shelves would gaze at me in consternation. What about us? They would ask.

Indeed, every single book on my shelves is one that I bought fully intending to absorb its contents. Every book is one I imagined myself curling up with on a Friday night and getting lost in its world. Every book is one I could love.

But like most book lovers, I bought too many. And now they crowd me, hoping to be that one that I choose to bring to life in my mind for a few hours.

In the end, after putting the books on the new shelves, I chose Marina T., whom I am having a literary affair with these days. She was happy I brought her to the couch to share intellectual intercourse with.

The other books just looked at me askance. Your time is coming, I promised each one. A foolish promise, but a man can dream.