Why own books

When moving to Los Angeles, I got rid of about half my books, things I hadn't read in years. We had gotten into a sort of frenzy of discarding material goods, thinking about the approximately dollar-per-pound that it would cost to ship things across the country. We threw away or donated shelves and shelves of books, bags of clothes that had fallen out of rotation, boxes of memorabilia and tchotchkes sitting in the basement.

Too many books. Becca and I took a Great Books program together in college and not only still had copies of some of those classics, but still had doubles. Out went the Aeneid, the Odyssey, Dante. Out went garage sale purchases of modern fiction, music history, beadmaking guides, few of which I had ever actually read. We went from bookshelves in every room and boxes in the basement to two large shelves worth, and those not even full.

Since then, I've occasionally felt a loss out of proportion to the books as mere material things. Particularly the books that I had read, these were an externalized part of my memory. I have tried to abide by an informal rule in the past couple years to only buy books I have already read. Buying books on recommendation, on spec, resulted in the giant piles of unread books we had around the house, and hid the gems from my past that contain ideas that had become a part of myself. I have a bookshelf of science fiction, much of it first read when I was a teenager, and am not only able to pick up a book and glance at a favorite passage as the fancy strikes, but I can glance across the spines and remember who I was and, intellectually, where I come from, at least in part.

Being a heavy library user, and consumer of more ephemeral media like newspapers, magazines, websites, podcasts, TV, and movies even at the peak of my book collection, those spines represented only a small fragment of the ideas flowing into my life (from media. Forget trying to create physical representations of  all the conversations I draw intellectual sustenance from). But they are something. A persistent, visual, neat reminder of my books, emphasis on the "my". I wish I had a similarly persistent externalized memory of the rest of my intellectual environment.

It would be the reverse of that scene in The Neverending Story II in which the little boy main character, under the sway of the evil witch (Oh, gender roles of Hollywood! Oh, humanity!), trades wishes for memories, and as each wish is made a memory leaves him and turns into a giant swirly marble, collecting in the witch's crystal ball.

I want for myself those marbles, each marked with a memory, that I can run my fingers through, turn over, sort into piles, put on shelves, juggle and put in a pocket. Barring that, I'll own books.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: toast with butter and honey
lunch: hot dog fried rice
dinner: spaghetti and meat sauce, with friends
dessert: chocolate walnut banana bread