This bookcase is only an example of the problem I'm facing all over this apartment. By NYC standards it's a large one bedroom, and I've used all my space fully the book case shows. This seems to mean I've got about four normal rooms of stuff packed in here. So I'm paring as I'm packing.
I know a time comes when energy flags and the attitude is "oh, just chuck it." I'm trying to avoid that and make reasonable judgments. What do I REALLY want/need? Of course I think of Diogienese who lived in a barrel which served as house and clothing. No, I need more than the barest basics. I am spoiled as most of us are in that sense. I want the piano and the music books, also the many, many books - but by no means all of them.
Today's packing was mainly the manuscripts I've written in 30 years. One copy of each -- is that wise? Well, it has to be. It's not deathless prose but precious to me. There is much involved in each and simply handling them, remembering or wondering why I don't remember ... it's been an intense day with as much repression as vivid remembrance. I could write at length about a writer's regrets ... it doesn't help that even as I write I know Joyce Carol Oates is at a Barnes and Nobel at Lincoln Center pushing a new book. She is a near age mate who has been on my "horizon" since our late teens when she got an auspicious start and I watched and envied. She had a literary life, I had a different kind. But she is a high water mark for me, one I could not attain. So the day has been full of that kind of thought. Not very pleasant but also not remorseful, more an acknowledgment that each life is individual and has it's arc, it's regrets and satisfactions. There are satisfactions in those manuscripts that possibly no one else will read. Still they are not going to be destroyed, not by me. And they must be moved -- alas, there's the rub.
2 comments:
alas, I see you share my affliction! see http://www.flickr.com/photos/borrowedeyes/2107142131/ ~"TeaNi"
I can thoroughly sympathize. Ten years ago my mother and I moved in together. She had an overstuffed one bedroom apartment containing what she had kept after selling her house. I had a large two bedroom with enclosed porch that was also stuffed to capacity. We crammed what we couldn't bear to part with into a two bedroom townhouse. Since that time we have pared down considerable. My books have been the most resistant area but that too is being reduced. I have started going through them a bit at a time. Lately I have started re-reading many of them, often for the first time in years. When I find that I really can't get the interest in them to read all the way through, no matter how fondly I remember the first reading, they go to the local library.
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