Shelf Life

Two years, almost to the day, after my husband and I purchased our current house, we’ve now finished painting what will be the music room. It might also, however, be considered the intellectual heart of our home, because in addition to being the space selected to house my husband’s and son’s collection of string instruments and our music collection, it contains a wall of built-ins on which we’ve chosen to shelve the books we have accrued. Or, more specifically, the books my husband and I have accrued. A child’s need for books is a more urgent matter, and immediately after we moved in I organized, cleaned, and shelved my son’s books up in his bedroom.

The built-in cabinets and shelves in the music room were, in fact, painted a year ago. I say “were painted,” though I should use an active construction: we painted them. But nothing else in the room had yet been dealt with. Cracks and even large holes in the plaster walls required patching. Gaps at joints between woodwork and walls needed closing up with what turned out to be many tubes of caulk. The ceiling, walls, and extensive trim cried out for fresh coats of primer and paint. The room isn’t large, but all this work made it feel like a chasm to cross. We did, however, manage to cross it. And after many months, we’d arrived at the moment when all we needed to do was fill the room with our belongings. Again I found myself staring into the chasm.

The first tasks were unencumbered, and only mildly tedious. I’m not a musician, so I let the man and boy of the house carry in their guitars and set them up on stands, additional ones recently having been purchased, so the instruments could remain easily at hand for impromptu playing. The guitars, along with my son’s borrowed upright bass, which is propped up in a corner, display beautifully. I did step in to help when it came time to haul CDs out of a closet, and we all pitched in to wipe their cases free of dust, quickly consult on how to categorize them, and shelve them alphabetically along the far wall in what turned out to be just the right spot. They fit perfectly. One day and done. I washed my hands of those tasks and of the household dirt, ready to move on to the books.

But books are complicated.

Other responsibilities intervened—routine household chores, yard work, paid freelance jobs, walking the dog, picking my son up from his afterschool activities—but on a Sunday afternoon about two weeks on, I seized the moment. It was time to put our house in order, nothing metaphorical about it.

To get the books out of the way while we renovated the room that would be their permanent home, we had hoisted the moving boxes they were still in onto metal shelving units in an upstairs room. That room will eventually be a bedroom but for now contains a crowded array of bike parts, building supplies and tools, window air-conditioners, and rolled up rugs. It’s our house’s version of the Island of Misfit Toys.

I hefted the first large box downstairs and opened it. So far so good.

The books inside were dusty. Because our move was only a local one, a mixed blessing, we had packed somewhat haphazardly. There hadn’t seemed any point at the time in cleaning the books off, so now I had to. My son had just done me the favor of vacuuming the shelves off, dusting them with a dry cloth, and then wiping them down with a damp rag, and I didn’t want the dust from our old house sullying the relatively fresh gloss white paint, which looked so nice. We selected gloss white in part for ease of cleaning the grime that would inevitably accumulate on the open shelves. The dust bothers me greatly, although I suspect I’m the only member of our three-person household who even notices it.

My process for cleaning the books, I decided, would be similar to what was done for the shelves: vacuum the dust off them, clean their exteriors with a slightly damp rag or paper towel, and wipe them dry. Some might consider this overkill. I have in recent years had two people—no, let’s be clear: two women—declare to me unapologetically in the course of a conversation that they don’t keep a clean house. I am fascinated by this. These are women of an intellectual bent who strike me as being confident of themselves and their place in the world, and it would seem that they choose to apply their time and energy to pursuits of the mind when possible, rather than to good housekeeping, which itself demands considerable time and energy. And as we all well know, this does often become an either/or scenario, because there are only so many hours in a day. I, however, come from a family on the peasant end of the bourgeois spectrum who tend toward domestic cleanliness, so casual housekeeping is not my birthright. Also, I just think better in clean, orderly surroundings. But as I’ve already indicated, our books were dusty, which reinforced my perception of my shortcomings in taking care of our house. And yet neither am I a towering intellect. It occurred to me that here was my inner struggle made manifest.

On the day I began tackling this project, the sun was shining and the temperature hovered in the low 60s, so once I cleaned the first batch of books, I set them on the stone floor of our sunroom to dry. I wanted my books to see a bit of sunlight. But spread out there, they looked so numerous, and I began to feel anxious, because this was just one carton’s worth of books. There were more to go, and the ones there on the floor still needed to be sorted and shelved. I began to wish, albeit halfheartedly, that I were constitutionally capable of simply removing the books from the cardboard boxes and putting them away in no particular order, thereby saving myself what I knew was going to be many hours of labor. When I even considered that, however, incipient feelings of panic overtook me.

Since I was going to run out of floor space, I knew I would have to begin sorting and shelving soon. But maybe not yet. I needed to achieve critical mass before I had anything to categorize. And also, the dog needed walking and dinner needed cooking. I had barely gotten started, so the interruption made me grumpy.

Returning to the project later that afternoon, I determinedly headed upstairs for the second box of books. Same routine. Just as slow going. But before bedtime, I slogged back up the stairs for box number three. My husband had already let me know that he had pulled out the boxes containing books and stacked them near the doorway of that room so I didn’t need to go looking for them. Which was considerate. But seeing this stack of medium-size moving boxes, I suddenly felt burdened.

Really, there weren’t even that many books, because we’d culled our collection before. The house we lived in previously was not big, and one of our responses to the exigencies of tight quarters and strictly limited storage space was to jettison belongings, including giving away (and, I must confess, also taking, in moments of weakness) books via those wonderful Little Free Libraries in our neighborhood. We even went as far, on one occasion, as donating about a hundred books to our local library for their book sale. I regret having parted with some of those books, but it had to be.

Yet here I was, still feeling daunted by a task that shouldn’t have been overly onerous. Because I had an inkling how much time and labor this was about to take. And how many decisions I would have to make. As I said, books are complicated.

In the morning, I delved in again, refreshed after a good night’s sleep, and emboldened by having begun this big job. Like a writer who had ended the previous day’s output mid-scene, l had some momentum going.

One thought I’d had in the overnight hours was that I should process the books one box at a time, or at least one category at a time, to avoid feeling overwhelmed again. I have repeatedly advised my son to check over his math assignments and tests after each problem he completes rather than waiting to check them all at once. The analogy seemed apt here. I grabbed a box and got started.

But as I opened the first box that morning, I realized I shouldn’t squander this opportunity to take stock, and that I should do so before investing too much time in cleaning and sorting. My husband’s and my prior culling of our book collection meant I didn’t need to mount a full campaign to purge our personal library, but I concluded that I should consciously choose what to keep and what not to. A good thing can easily become too much of a good thing, and though this house’s storage space is ample, it isn’t infinite. And considerations of shelf space aside, I wanted to realistically determine which books I as a reader still needed and which ones I no longer did. Of course, this is not always easy: if an average size paperback book weighs, say, half a pound, the baggage it carries weighs many times that.

And so I began.

With some of the books, it was like seeing an acquaintance I hadn’t ever much cared for. I could tell at a glance, without even cracking those books open, that I could live without them.

Any jargon-laden volumes written by academics for an academic audience: these were a cinch to cast off. College textbooks were a relatively easy decision as well. Relatively. Given how long ago I graduated with my degree—now measured in decades—I am embarrassed to admit how many books from college courses I still had, but to my credit, I did enjoy rereading them. Or, if I am being honest, reading small portions of some of them again. On occasion.

Although grimacing at the thought of the small fortune they had cost, even purchased second-hand, which mine often were, I nonetheless understood that they no longer earned a place in our home. Thus, into a pile they went, for donation to the public library, or in our front yard with a “Free: Please Take” sign on them. A small few even went into the paper-recycling bin. That did feel sacrilegious, but also realistic: I felt fairly certain I would not be able to find a good home for a textbook from a college survey course on Western Civilization, especially one defaced with handwritten notes and fluorescent-yellow highlighter.

Those decisions made, I soldiered on with right-sizing our collection, but also found myself falling down the rabbit hole of thinking about how much money had been spent on the books. That seemed to me to be my practical nature dominating again. Discarding belongings that still have usable life seemed wrong. After all, the money spent on the book might instead have been spent on another opportunity—money, like shelf space, being finite. But I concluded that if I’d read the book, and learned or absorbed what I could from it, then the money hadn’t been wasted. I talked myself off that ledge.

But even if I’d already read a particular book, what if I wanted to read it again? Most books worth reading are best read multiple times. Third time is a charm, I find. (Maybe I’m just not a quick learner.) And if I hadn’t already read the book, I had to decide whether I ever would. Here, too, the either/or scenario seemed to hold true: either I would keep it and read it, or I would give it away and not read it. Because if I kept it and then didn’t ever even peruse it or refer to it, it would become so much stagnant water puddling in the energy of my house. No, more: in my life. And if I chose to give it away, I’d really made the decision that I wouldn’t ever read it. Yes, sure, I might still be able to come by a copy of it at the public library if I changed my mind and wanted to read it after all, but chances are that I wouldn’t. It’s an acknowledgment that time—like shelf space, like money—has limits. My life on earth will end, and I will not have read all these books, even if I wanted to. Which I didn’t, I was relieved to discover.

But I wavered. Absolutely, deciding to part with a book can be freeing. But when I’ve cut off the possibility of hearing the story the novel would have told, or learning the information the book would have imparted to me—even if it’s something I was never inclined to immerse myself in, such as, say, the military strategies of the Roman army just before the decline of the empire—I grieve for what will never be. It’s the end of that particular possibility. And it’s sad.

Continuing my review, I felt the tug of attachment to some books, and these required a turn-through and more than a moment’s hesitation before being placed in the discard pile. But once the pile was fitted into three or four shoeboxes, what remained were books that I could not part with just yet. They were the old friends I was so happy to see after their two-year exile. And then, without consciously deciding to, I settled in for an unhurried visit, so that they and I could renew our friendship. Making myself comfortable in a chair, I opened up the first book that called out to me and began to read.

Then realized that if I kept reading, this project was going to take a very long while.

So I continued. Vacuuming, wiping with a damp cloth, and sometimes sorting into preliminary stacks. But my mind wandered.

I contemplated how the books we own convey so much more than the content intended by their authors and editors. For one thing, mine documented the arc of my interests and pursuits, and of my husband’s. I don’t say “our,” because we’ve each purchased our own books. Rare among these boxes are books that we have both read. It’s his and it’s mine, not ours. This is not bad. I have been an appreciative bystander to his interest in architecture. I’ve loved that he loves music. I’ve marveled at his ability to read how-to guides and then proceed to how to. They just aren’t my books. I don’t recall him ever consulting my Italian and French dictionaries for quick translations during trips, but he’s glad when I’ve remembered to pack them in our suitcase. My pleasure in trees and plants pleases him, but I don’t pass my gardening books on to him to read, regardless of how they’ve captivated me. My interests, not his.

I also considered how the pages contain tales of our past lives, both separate and intertwined. And I mean this literally: I find an astonishing number of mementoes tucked between random pages of random books. Theater tickets and programs, movie-ticket stubs; postcards written but not sent, and also postcards received; the occasional love letter; a pressed flower sent to me by my beloved grandmother, now deceased; an itinerary for mine and my husband’s honeymoon; my son’s artwork; even a photograph of my husband’s college girlfriend.

It’s like traveling back in time.

I suppose it was simply for the sake of convenience that we stuck these items into the pages of books, too lazy or unambitious or busy to properly catalogue and save the photographs and other items of remembrance in an album. An offhand act of indecision: I don’t want to throw it away, and I have to put it somewhere, so I might as well put it here.

Or maybe these makeshift scrapbooks are evidence of us not fully acknowledging or not wanting to fully acknowledge that the items in question were things we wanted to keep.

Alternately, it could be secretiveness at play: we recognized that some of the items were not entirely appropriate to hold on to, but an impulse remained to keep some some small part of ourselves to ourselves, or even hidden from ourselves. If you hung on to the photograph of an old girlfriend or boyfriend in an album, that might justifiably be thought a bit strange, especially long after the relationship has ended. But a photograph—or souvenir or slip of paper—tucked away in the pages of a book you happened to have been reading when you acquired the thing is simply an object in a time capsule, easily forgotten and possibly never to be seen again by you or anyone you live with. But whatever the scenario, it shows that you couldn’t commit to letting go of that piece of your life the item represents. You needed that thing or that part of yourself for a while longer. And as I turn through the pages of these books, I find myself throwing away quite a lot less than I might have hoped, even the photo of my husband’s girlfriend from three decades past.

Some of what I find makes me smile, or laugh out loud with delight. Other souvenirs make me feel melancholy. Some I have no recollection of. For instance, who is the person mentioned in this note found inside the cover of the novel I just opened? I haven’t the faintest idea.

Something I’d also forgotten was that I’d received so many books as gifts. I can tell which ones, from the inscriptions in them—although “inscriptions” seems an overstatement: these are just handwritten notes, sometimes neat and sometimes scrawled. If the person hadn’t written anything, I signed my name, and noted the year and who had given me the book, information I feel glad to have now.

As I opened covers, my youthful penmanship looked silly to me, overly large and looped, and slightly self-important, as did my having written my name and the date in them at all. But I certainly don’t remember feeling self-important. I wrote my name and the year in my books for the practical reason of asserting that they were mine and recording when I’d received them, or bought them for myself. But I do also think that receiving or purchasing a book was for me, particularly when I was younger, an occasion to be marked. It was worthy of noting.

One of the books that did come to me inscribed by the giver was from my husband before we were married. Clearly, we were more romantic then. At least judging from what he wrote.

I also came across a novel given to me by a college friend. I don’t keep in touch with anyone from those years (except my husband, but sometimes even he and I don’t talk much), but I did see this friend at one point before my son was born, so about thirteen or fourteen years ago. Truthfully, she annoyed me, and I didn’t see the point of continuing the friendship—we no longer had anything in common, and I felt no connection—but when I see her name and kind words to me in this book, I feel guilt, as well as surprise, since I hadn’t recalled that she’d given this to me.

Other books took me by surprise as well, including a pretty fabric-covered writing journal, given to me by my older brother’s first serious girlfriend. I generally feel very grateful for gifts, and I have always taken pride in my ability to remember who gave me what. How, then, could I have forgotten that these acts of generosity occurred?

Maybe it’s because most books sit on a shelf either untouched or pulled out only from time to time, unlike, say, a shirt that you wear frequently.

I often lament that when I present someone with a gift, I don’t ever hear if they like it. I actually dislike rote gift-giving and exchanges for this reason. But I’m touched by these presents, even if I can’t now recall how gratified I was by them at the time. And while they prompt me to contemplate whether and how my own inclination toward giving has fallen short, I marvel at being able, in the form of these books, to hold the spirit of generosity in my hands and examine it.

But I was still tripping over the piles of books on the floor.

I’d been sorting and categorizing loosely as I cleaned and assessed and mentally catalogued, but some further thought was needed. It wasn’t like a public library or a bookstore, where a well-rounded inventory is maintained in predetermined classifications. I had to go through the process of seeing what we had and determining categories accordingly. Starting with the basics, I divided books into fiction and nonfiction. That was easy. Then I subdivided: fiction into novels, short stories, plays, and poetry; nonfiction into history, philosophy and religion, architecture and art, urban planning and other contemplations on place, travel guides and maps, language study books, law tomes, sheet music, and miscellaneous nonfiction not numerous enough to be further subdivided. My gardening books, thankfully, were already snug on their own shelf upstairs.

Then, of course, I alphabetized the books. A friend of mine who I’d been describing this saga to kidded that I should have sorted them by color. Not even possible in my universe.

At this point in time, I was days into the project at hand. And it was soothing to my soul to see disorder turn to order. But my frustration mounted too. There I was, after all, surrounding myself with books, but cleaning, sorting, and shelving them, not reading them. It was like “water, water every where, nor a drop to drink.” The bourgeois part of me thrilled at the thought of tidiness and cleanliness. The intellectual part of my nature, such as it is, strained at its collar. But, I told myself, just as our intellects are wrapped in physical beings that need tending to, these books as physical objects needed some attention; their contents would have to sit tight as practical matters prevailed.

Eventually, I finished the job. My first thought was how welcoming the room now looked. The irregular heights and varied colors of the books contrasted satisfyingly with the rigid and regular white framework of the painted wood shelves, amplifying the warmth and coziness of the sunshine yellow we had painted the walls. My second thought was, is that really all the books? I even checked the messy room upstairs to see if we’d missed a box. None there. I double-checked the collection of novels, looking for obvious gaps in the alphabet, so that I might determine if, say, N through O had been mislaid. No such gaps existed. Feelings of regret and grief overtook me: I had rashly given away too many books.

But I looked again at the shelves and viscerally felt the airiness. Rather than an impenetrable wall of books, the open spaces that remained drew me in and made me want to approach my books, pull one off a shelf, and read.

And later that week, when I encountered a word whose meaning eluded me, I rose from my chair, pulled open the folding doors of the wide entrance to the music room, and crossed the honey-colored pine floor that is original to this 1886 house. Looking up at the shelf of reference books, I hesitated, and experienced a moment’s worry that the small dictionary of literary terms I needed had not passed muster in the last round of inspections. But no, happily, there it was, exactly where it should have been.