Freed From Behind The Paywall: Why Your Books Are Like Your Mind
I nearly lost all my old books - and it shook me to the core (From Paid Post Feb 2022)
Recently, I had an odd and disturbing experience. The family house I lived in with my wife before we divorced five years ago contained a large number of my books. Last week, the house was finally sold, and I had to take the books away. But I had nowhere to put them, so I put them temporarily in the basement of the block of flats where I live now. I was going away for a week, and had no time to store them properly, but I thought they were safe. Who steals books?
When I got back from my holiday, the books were gone.
I was in a state of panic and confusion. I coujldn’t understand why anyone would want my old books - they were mainly paperbacks, nothing precious to anyone else - and their resale value would be nil. But after making inquiries, after two days the books were still missing and I had no clue where they had gone.
It felt like I had lost a large chunk of myself - of my mind, of my soul, of my memories. Perhaps this is melodramatic - I am used to losing things since I suffer ADHD - but this felt different. The fact that I wasn’t even sure what books they were - I hadn’t had time to inspect them - made it worse, as if a piece of my essential memory had been amputated.
On the third day, I received a phone call from someone who had a heavy European accent. Spanish? He said he had taken all my books and put them in his car, thinking that they were being thrown away. I didn’t bother to interrogate him as to why on earth he would want all these battered old books - I was just too pleased that I had them back. He said he would return them to where he found them, and he was true to his word.
Hauling the books up to my top floor flat, this time determined that no more misfortune would overtake them, I spread them out on the floor in random piles. And there they were - books I’d forgotten I’d had, books that I had never read, books I had started and never finished, books I had devoured voraciously. There was fiction, psychology , philosophy, religion. These books had formed who I had become. They were , in a real sense, the very person I was because they documented by obsessions, my interests, my loves.
I immediately almost as an act of thanks picked on up and started re-reading one of the books - John Updike’s ‘Self Consciousness’ a marvellous collection of essays that I read when it first came out more than 35 years ago. The words sparkled at me, the sentences danced. I had read them before , perhaps twice before, but I had forgotten so many of them. It was incredibly nourishing to just be able to pick up this half discarded tome and read it again, to excavate my literary past and discover diamonds.
I have recently bought a new house and I am excited to put all the books on the shelves agian, so they make a tattoo, a collage of colours which I can run my finger of the spines over, that I can lend to my children, that I can browse and access at will. What a miracle! So much more satisfying a spectacle than the fresh volumes on the walls of a bookshop, or the well thumbed books ih a public library. These were MY books, that had all entered my mind to some extent and left dents and seeds and flowers. Even the ones I had never read displayed a trace of me, because I had wanted to read them in the first place, and now I still could. It was as if a living, breathing organism had been handed back to me, Velveteen Rabbtis, all worn and torn by love. I really hadn’t realised what they meant to be until they nearly disappeared.
I don’t look after my books. They are scribbled on, dog-eared, stained. This makes me love them more. They are engaged with, touched, scrunched, rumpled, just like people you love are. And I will continue to treat them like errant urchins. But I will file them and stack them with additional pride and happiness now. When I die, if someone who wants to know who I was, certainly they could read the novels I have written. . But they would get a better idea perhaps, looking at my bookshelves. This was the uncprocessed thing itself ( a novel is highly processed) the raw material that made the mind that made the novel. And their rawness made them beautiful.
I am so happy to have my books again. It makes me feel I never need buy another one, because there is enough material here to re-visit and finish and even embark upon, to keep my going for years. Thety are my proxy soul and mirror, in which I see myself reflected. I shall never be so careless with them again. Worthless in a financial sense, they are more precious still than family photographs, which are external things, while books are internal monologues from a single mind, an arrangement of symbols, facts and imaginings that a search on the Internet can never remotly match, however extensive.
They are my books. They are me. I will never let them go again.
In 2019, when I had to leave London and return to Brazil to care for my mom, I left behind 18 years worth of books. I just couldn't afford to bring them all on the plane (my journals were already costly enough) so I tried to hand them out before the vast majority were left at a charity shop. I still think of them 5 years later!
Know the feeling Tim. As if your sense of self is brutally snatched away by intruders. For me it was discovering an underground lock-up garage I rented in Kilburn (to store half my treasured vinyl record collection and old Garrard record player and Kef speakers)was broken into - everything half inched, gone. All I could do was say a prayer for such things as Can’t buy a thrill, Steely Dan, Tapestry Carole King, Led Zeppelin 4 etc At least it wasn’t my entire collection. Kind of shows how we should not take our old knackered books and music for granted. Expert declutterer Marie Kondo says we should bin these things. But that is not to do them the justice and respect they deserve.