Back to Bach next week! In the meantime, I thought you’d appreciate a story I wrote after I ‘discarded’ the majority of my possessions— mostly books. Whereas I easily tossed things like clothes, artwork, komono, plates, pens, et cetera, getting rid of my massive library took months and was an emotional rollercoaster. I haven’t ever looked back! …mostly.
Sans Eyes, Sans Books, Sans Everything
If you go home with somebody and they don’t have any books, don’t f*** ‘em!-Not so old aphorism
Last scene of all,That ends this strange eventful history,Is second childishness and mere oblivion;Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.-As You Like It, 2:7
-for Marie Kondo (and Rachel)
At eighteen years old, I moved to New York City with five books: a Mozart biography, a Bach biography, a Beethoven biography, a book about Beethoven’s piano sonatas, and a Bible. My sheet music library (which was already massive) and any other books (which were insubstantial) I left with my parents. All I valued at that time was playing the piano and any reading dealing with that. After a year, my personal Pentateuch had grown four times in size, but was humble still.
Eleven years later I had one-thousand nine hundred and thirty two books.
Books bought, books found, books stolen, books given, books I printed: any way one could get a book, I got books. I dreamed of creating a library that resembled my teacher Lowenthal’s: wall to wall books, books falling out of books, books used as bookshelves themselves, pages on the ground from who knows which books, books with missing covers, covers with missing books, books rapidly-read-horizontally-stacked-under-coffee-cups books, books under-the-piano-to-muffle-the sound books, books piled-on-top-of-the-piano-to-complete-a-cliche books, the divine image of the godhead seen in books spinning endlessly out from the library walls.
“I always imagined heaven to be a kind of library.”
That was the first sentence by Borges I ever read, and Lowenthal’s study was the closest to paradise I had been.
—
I lived in seven different apartments in New York, and with each move at least 75% of the boxes were books, and with books come their doomed counterparts: bookcases (so help us god.) Many a reader may commiserate. Once the first small white case was filled, (Ikea, 2007) there needed to be a match (Ikea, 2008.) By 2009, I had two crumbling, completely useless, bookcases.
I called the poet Ron Price, who, though he owned less books than Lowenthal, seemed to have given more thought to their casing. I discussed a sleek white Ikea bookshelf I had seen online:
“Oh! Don’t buy a f***ing BILLY!” he shouted.
He knew the make. …Everybody knew the make. Little did I know, the crumbling pieces of piecemeal that already housed my books bore the same name.
“Buy some nice wood. Make some sturdy shelves.”“Hmm… You’ve been down this road it seems.”He chuckled.“The… shelves are even more important than the books?” I went so far as suggesting“I don’t know about that.” he muttered.
In a month, I had, at only a few times the cost of escaping Billy’s curse, three black bookcases, two inches thick per shelf. Unbendable.
My East Harlem studio was immensely stylish: I dreamed I would see reconstructions of it in museums as I had seen reconstructions of Proust’s bedroom. Two tall cases stood side by side, and a third half-case, tastefully empty, was stacked horizontally on the other two. It created one giant fifteen foot wide wall, ten feet tall. It was like a tree for inanimate objects.
And then, many a reader may commiserate, I tasted the rainbow: a design magazine with a bookshelf arranged by color. I didn’t do anything else for two weeks.
I spent every day agonizing over the color of books and where on the new color coordinated shelves they would go. I grouped by color, but then realized my groupings were random. I needed the spectrum: a clean sweep from infrared to ultraviolet. I needed a circle? No, but, this was disastrous. Is color a circle? No, color is a triangle, right? The primary colors are only three… After two months of switching books around, I hit upon the solution: Primary colors would outline a triangle marking the top and the lowest corners. Then, the secondary colors would form the inverted triangle pointed at the bottom. It was so obvious. The only choice then was which of the primary colors to put at the top. In my collection, it made sense that blue should be the crown. Hence: orange went to the bottom, green and purple at the shoulders, therefore yellow and red at the... damn! That looks amazing!
But what of all these books without color? Whereas I had previously banished them to the edges, now the black and white spines fit brilliantly into the middle. A zero in the middle of all the brilliance. Quickly, no matter how beloved the content, brown, tan, and off-white, gray books, these were imposters. I stuffed them here or there where they wouldn’t stick out. Eventually I put them with the dishes: behind the cabinets. The bookshelf, now made of only resplendent spines, became a centerpiece. It had eye gravity. It never escaped comments from guests.
Any difficulties one might imagine, like two different colors on a spine, for example, were surprisingly rare. And when they did occur, each book somehow fit into only one section. There was one book though, (three novels by DH Lawrence) that had an obtuse, subtle, yet obvious, but odorous! an obnoxious color. It could not be placed: was it pinkish orange, bluish pink…? I know of nothing in the universe colored the same. I tried him in the reds, in the near pinks, in the center of the oranges, on the fringes of the oranges, with the near yellows, no luck. I banished him to the basement.
“Look at all these orange books!” That’s what most people said after being sucked into the shelf for some time. (Penguin fiction, bottom center.) Schirmer sheet music publishes in bright yellow, which held down a sunny corner, whereas Henle publishes in matte blue. Dover —many a musician has cringed— seems to publish only in the most carefully selected distasteful colors, but when searching for the perfect transition from reddish-orange to orangish-red, Dover somehow prints an accurate Pantone 17-1464.
Now, perhaps you reading will join in with the main criticism, which was, “how can you find anything now?!” But this was ridiculous, I knew all my books of course: the color of every spine, the height, width, the feel, the smell… besides, I had actually read most of these! (That oh-so-memorable moment my illiterate aunt visited and accused me of ‘collecting them,’ that there was no way a person could read so many books.)
Rachel would quiz me:“Ancient China?”“In the off green.”“Nonsense of Edward Lear?”“Is dark red.”“Baghavad Gita?”“Purple!”
Never could she stump me. She started switching books to see if I would notice. At first she tried the obvious: swapping a blue with a yellow, as if to test if I so much as glanced toward the shelf once a day. Then, sneakily, she tried switching a dark red with an off red. Finally she took to inverting certain books, but I noticed every time.
—
This was short-lived. Maybe only half a year before the shelf was condemned. It actually did get photographed in a (now defunct) design magazine. I felt like I had achieved something great when that happened— but it was April 2015, and we collectors know what happened then:
Marie Kondo burst on the scene. God save our recycle bins.
One excerpt from her book— a book about organizing, mind you, not a book about the human spirit, not a book of poems, not a book about love or anything of the sort: a book about organizing, left me in tears. What was wrong with me?
And so began the days of getting rid of all my books. Poignant Pentateuch to boastful nineteen-hundred, however many it had been, it was all doomed to die now.
Obviously enough, all of the books with the dishes were sold. If they were there, what was their use? Those that gave me a hard time in the color wheel were quickly off the wheel and onto the street. Reference books- gone, cookbooks- gone, any extremely common book- gone. I had, in the eleven years of reading, lost touch with my religion: goodbye St. Augustine, St. John of the Cross, GK Chesterton, (I’ll keep Thomas Merton, though.) I had also, in a sense, also outgrown the beats: goodbye Ginsberg, farewell Ferlinghetti. I sold six hundred books to one single shop in Brooklyn (and visited it a year later to the eeriest of feelings…) I made many a friend happy by giving away any book they asked for. I was actually able to pay my rent with book sales, and to show for it, I had an even brighter, ever slimmer color wheel.
That April, I sold, gave away, or put on the street sixteen hundred books. I now had only three hundred odd books. That shelf gave me such immense joy to look at and be near, I stopped purging. I had arrived. Something, as Marie Kondo said it would, ‘clicked.’
—
But poor Rachel. We were through. I left for Europe to moan. Would I ever grow up? When I came back to my old life, and my new color wheel, the joy wasn’t in it. I had to clear out all the memories and rid myself of all attachments. The books she gave me had to go, even those quite dear to me: Steinbeck’s letters, R Kelly’s ‘Soulacoster: the diary of me’ (once full of laughter, now simply full of sadness… for godssake, the ‘of’ is in italics!) Frank Ohara’s poems, Thomas Lux poems, gone. She was a reader, all the books we read together had to go: Eugenides, Cheever, Dahl, Yeats.
I was nearing 200 books. Some didn’t fit in with the colors so I taped their spines with brightly colored tape — then a few days later thought that seemed stupid and inauthentic. If a book had to be dressed to fit into the damn wheel, it didn’t deserve to be there in the first place! Curbside.
I started getting rid of books I never thought I could live without. It made me feel like I was almost irreverent to let some go, as if I were quitting a religion I didn’t realize I was part of.
I turned to Marie Kondo who mentioned it was important to thank the discarded objects, to let them go peacefully. Maybe that’s what I was doing wrong. I set condemned books in a pile near the front door for a few days before hauling them to the shop. Every time I walked in or out of the apartment, I thanked them, but mostly, I said goodbye.
In Europe, I had spent a solitary month reading music electronically— I never thought I would be able to do that, but I quite enjoyed it. Returning then, I made an effort to stay modern: I got rid of every book of Dover sheet music I had (and I advise every musician to do the same: every single one is online, free, in the same edition.) I donated them to a music school. It seemed charitable, but only I knew I was just being selfish.
I had an abusive high-school piano teacher who nearly ruined music for me (hell, she nearly ruined me!) so what were those same books doing in my house!? The Well-Tempered Clavier, Schubert impromptus, sure, these are not permissible to live without, but what were these specific objects, filled with her hateful scribbles, doing in my house?
A friend of mine, Tepfer, took those six volumes.
“But… why are you getting rid of these?” He asked.
I warned him of the horrid teacher, that even though I had erased all her markings, she was still in there, somehow, messing with my head. He chuckled a bit and left. He didn’t believe in such black magic.
A half hour later he texted:“man you werent kidding about the bad juju in those books halfway home the bag dropped from my bike slid under front wheel locked it flipped landed on my wrist waiting 4 xrays”
He fractured his wrist. This is a true story.
—
I was down to a hundred and sixty books, though fifty of those were a first edition of the Harvard Classics. Published in 1909-1910, these represented the fifty volumes of what every educated gentleman in 1910 should know (the first volume is Ben Franklin’s autobiography and other Americana, to give you a sense.) Ten more of those hundred and sixty books were my grandmother’s books from the 19th century, the earliest was Goethe’s ‘Elective Affinities’, printed in 1871.
They were so old I never opened them. These will fetch a pretty penny. I thought.
So I took the more than century-old paper snake, eighth feet in length, to the famous Strand bookstore, where a famous (and I now know, retired) man appraised them. Entering the store, I saw a face which could have been so easily caricatured, I wasn’t sure it had a third dimension. His face had grown into the repetition of fingering books and staring into a computer screen. His nose held up his glasses, angled severely on his pointy face, pointed sharply at his task. Everything was pointed in lines. In fact, a whole row of people at the same long desk were appraising books in a line. His line of apprentices and all the energy in the room pointed toward him. Each person working behind the desk looked more and more like him as the line approached him. The appraiser at his left — clearly his successor and disciple— almost, almost! had his head, nose glasses, almost at the same angle. I waited with the others trying to strike it rich with whatever printed treasure chest a dead relative had forgotten about.
Luck saw that he, the master appraiser, handled my books. Without using the muscles in his neck to look, as if an odor had offended him, he took all but two seconds to consider the books from the 19th century. He didn’t touch them. The Harvard Classics— all fifty at once— received maybe five seconds of his glance, but still, he didn’t touch them. My beautifully illustrated edition of Shakespeare, nearly two feet tall, met his fingertips, and even met his caress. It went to one side of the counter.
“Mary,” speaking to an assistant, “would you please pass these books back to the gentleman.” She handed me back my eight-foot snake.
“We would buy this book from you at the value of 18 dollars.” He told me, speaking about the Shakespeare. We would. Not, we would like. He didn’t wait for my reply or reaction and was about to call the next customer when I interrupted.
“W… Wh… What about the other books?” I asked, “Are they too old?”
Without missing a beat, and yet without condescension, he replied, “It isn’t a matter of old: you could have an old book that’s worth a small fortune. It’s a matter of condition.”
His eyes traveled, as if it were the first time that day his glance left his hands, and he looked at me with an expression explaining that such eye contact was carefully rationed out. This was the glance of a master. There was no possibility of a counteroffer. I accepted his mastery and took the 18 dollars. I bought wine. Drinking from the bottle in the same neighborhood, I left the books, one at a time, on stoops of various apartments until the whole of the Harvard Classics had been strewn about on 4th avenue.
—
One hundred books. Count ‘em. I owned as many books as I did when I was a teenager! No longer was this large library weighing me down, hell, I might even be able to move now! Home would always be where the books were, and if I could fit my library into a suitcase, why then, I’d be like a bird!
“The only good reader is a re-reader.”
Nabokov said that. I pondered this. Was it true that I was less likely to read my hundred books, once, before I read my favorite ten, ten times? I calculated how much ten readings of ten books would influence me more than one reading through one hundred books. And so began my ultimate task of trying to divide one-hundred by ten.
I hadn’t read maybe five of the 100, but now, with so few books, those which went unread for years were finally readable! Three of the five were interesting, but the other two made me wonder why I had kept them for so many years. In any case I tossed all five, and then another five, and soon five more. I was coming close to the number of books Kondo recommended: 20, or if you can, 10 books.
—
I called the poet Ron Price because I felt like I was dying.
“You’re doing what?”“I got rid of almost all my books.”“Why?”“…I… I’m not sure.”
He laughed. Then in his signature Memphis-snake-bit-grit voice, “Sometimes you have to give away what you love before you can keep it.”
Ah… Yes, so true. I was giving away my love of literature to keep it, to acquire it again. I was going to become a re-reader and my band of ten books would allow me to…
Price interrupted my stream of positive thoughts and added, “but not always.”
Ah s***! I’m confused again. What was I doing!? Had I committed an egregious sin? Kondo’s book! Was this the most evil book of all? A book encouraging you to throw away books? She warned that the sentiment found in objects could die when you ‘purge,’ and therefore you start examining exactly where your real sentiment lies, but my god, I was pretty sure my real sentiment was lying in the garbage.
I opened one of the last Thomas Merton book I owned and read, “you cannot be a holy man if you value possessions.”
“Ach!” I shouted. I threw down the book.
I went walking with one of my favorite books to walk with: the heart and diamond sutras in beautiful translations. I must have read this book at least twelve times on walks. I tried to memorize it at one point. But there, on a bench, this one time, one word: attachment. As if rehearsed, I draped the book over a parking meter and walked on.
Finally, pretty close to only twenty books, I actually read Borges for the first time. Funny how that works. Until then, the only words of his I knew were about heaven being a library. And I’m pretty sure I had just spent months disassembling heaven. His words were,
“…reading (which is to say the rereading)…”
Again, here was another immortal talking about rereading!
And in an obsessive text to a friend about this whole process, I misspelled ‘bookshelf’ into ‘bookself.’ Oh happy mistake! Oh revealing accident! Your bookshelf is your book-self! Choose wisely:
Complete ShakespeareComplete poetry of Cesar VallejoThe Book of Tea- Kakuzo OkakuraTeh Tao Ching- Lao TzuChuang Tzu- (ed. Thomas Merton)Clavichord Tuning and Maintenance- Peter BavingtonA clavichord builders manual (1973)- David WayJ.S. Bach- Albert Schweitzer (2 Vol.)Bach, Essays on his Life and Music- C. WolffThe Well-Tempered Clavier (2 Vol.) (Newly purchased editions)
This is twelve books. Compared to the five books that arrived with me to this city, there is little change: the Messiah of the West has become the Messiah of the East, the piano has become the clavichord, but there is little change.
There are plans however: Two of my most read books (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and its sequel, Lila) I discarded due to their thick size and now crumbling covers, but not before finding the text of each, rearranging both into a single slim volume, and ordering it custom printed. Thirteen. Then the Bhagavad Gita: it’s always been one of the most beautiful things I have ever known, but the editions never have, so I wrote the entirety of the scripture into a beautiful yellow notebook: Fourteen.
In the process, I should mention, I cut down my clothes to six pairs of trousers, six shirts and a couple jackets, I gave away many sentimental objects, I sold half the artwork in my apartment and I deleted permanently twelve thousand photographs and sixteen thousand emails. Hitting the delete button quite literally made me feel lighter.
—
“So what if I gave you a book?” someone asks. I respond saying I will now have the space to read it and the freedom to get rid of it! “You would get rid of my gift?”
I turn to Kondo again: people who give gifts with the expectation that the receiver keeps them, are giving for the wrong reasons.
Others ask, “how could you do that? I just, I just love books so much!” But who else then, if not I, has ever known the love of books? “But the feel, the smell, the…” yes, and I too have known and loved every aspect of a book. “…but what will you read now?” Well, I’ll read everything. “…on one of those e-reader things?” Yes, on one of those.
Will I ever own more books in the future? Why not ask me if I’ll own less? My friend Jesse challenged me to scan all fourteen books into my computer and simply have no books. I’m up for the challenge, but for now enjoy looking at the narrow stripe (still organized by color) of fourteen. If there comes a book which I feel desperate to keep, it must be one that shakes me deeply, I would welcome that.
But for now, fourteen was Bach’s number and the number of lines in a Shakespeare sonnet.
-Brooklyn, 2015.
—
Postscript, 2017:
That book did arrive, number fifteen: Fernando Pessoa’s ‘Book of Disquiet.’
Post-postscript, 2021:
Pessoa’s writing has shaken me deeply enough that I have moved to Portugal. I now, very slowly, read him in the original. I notice even my local bike mechanic knows the names of at least four of Pessoa’s heteronyms. I have, in this frenzy, bought a dozen volumes of his writings, and a few things I decided I couldn’t live without, such as Whitman, Milton, William James, and R.H. Blythe’s four-volume haiku work. Still, I’m under 50 books, my entire library sits on a single shelf.
Post-post-postscript, 2026:
I currently own 286 books. Turns out I did grow up— 286 books and one child— but I’m getting ready for another purge— of books I mean. I’d like to get back around 200. I have a rule about a new book, which is that it must be hardcover and colorful on the spine. (Yes, my shelf is still ruled by the rainbow.) I can’t imagine owning nearly 2000 books ever again, but who knows: when writing this piece, I could not have imagined 286.
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