Tuesday, December 21, 2004
(11:36 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Packing Up My Library
As most of my readers know, I am soon moving from the Bourbonnais bungalow to an as-yet unspecified location in Chicago. There's a fair chance that I'll be in Chicago for a few years, but until I know for sure, it makes the most sense to travel light. Tara said I could store stuff in her basement, and my biggest amount of "stuff" by volume is my vast (for a twenty-four-year-old) library. There isn't a book on my shelf that I haven't thought of taking down and re-reading, or reading, as the case may be -- except for a few that Kevin Crimmins ditched when he briefly lived at my house, all of them were lovingly hand-selected.Thus it's not a question of sorting out the ones I like from the ones I don't like. Nor is it a question of sorting out the ones that I haven't read or that I'm likely to want to re-read from the ones I have read and am finished with -- as I said, I'm not finished with any of my books. Neither a strictly aesthetic nor a stricly consumerist logic will do, and I knew it, but the logic that imposed itself on me in the process of picking out one bookshelf-full of books to take to Chicago still surprised me: I am moving from thinking of books as vehicles for pleasure and amusement to thinking of them as tools in my own projects of writing. For instance, I have to keep my books on Bonhoeffer for when I decide to reformat it and send it to the third journal; I have to keep my books on Moltmann and Barth for the paper I thought I would revise this summer but never got around to; I have to keep Derrida for the translation, and Zizek and Milbank in case I decide to go that route with the thesis instead.
What's really interesting, though, is the books that make it into my travel-pack "on a technicality." There are first of all the books that made such a huge impression on me that I'm sure to want to cite them at some unpredictable point. For instance, I can't not have Kafka or Borges on my shelf anymore -- it'd be like failing to take along a Bible. The same general rule applies to Hegel and Heidegger. I'm not working on anything that bears directly on them, but what paper couldn't be improved by a superfluous citation of Hegel or Heidegger? Or there's the strange case of Ulyssess and a few others of that size: I need to take along a few big novels for the summertime, since I apparently decided I read a big novel every summer. There are a few others that I took along simply because I haven't read them or started and never finished them: Richard Ford's Independence Day, Judith Bulter's Subjects of Desire, Cesaro Cassarino's Modernity at Sea, etc.
It is out of this group of "technicalities" that I may need to make further cuts in the interest of economy -- but I am not yet ready to cut all the way, nor will I ever be. At the same time, I don't think I can ever go back to the simple acquisition of books for their own sake, to reading as a completely one-way process. Is this part of the misshapenness that comes from becoming an academic in specific, or is it the more general affliction of a writer?
