Goodbye books, and seller

Crammed on these shelves sits too much of myself. My bookshelves, I mean, and better said it would be too much of my selves. My book collection serves as a museum of who I have been before. There are the books I loved when I was a younger and less laudable person. There are the books I loved when I was a younger and more laudable person. There are the books I read because I looked up to people who read them. Those split into important subdivisions: books that enhanced my respect for the people who read them, and books that decreased that respect. And of course it matters a great deal, for curatorial purposes, how much I now respect those people and books (or how little).

Unread books lurk in bulk as well, marks of aspiration. Family: books I bought because I wanted to be the kind of person who read those books. Genus: books I never read. Species: aspiration remains unfulfilled, aspiration abandoned sadly, aspiration abandoned and I now find it an embarrassing or ill-advised aspiration. They have parallels in some species of books I actually read, specifically aspiration fulfilled and now regretted today; apsiration fulfilled and still respected today.

Left alone, collections, like cities and lives, fall to entropy. My book collection has begun to be reclaimed by the weeds of books stacked on top, papers and notebooks intruding, books gone feral and taken to nesting in stacks, heaps, in boxes, under papers or laundry. Even the orderly parts are unfamiliar, the collection and I have had our relationships strained by the stresses of work and parenting and aging.

I have begun to venture back into the collection because I am relocating. There is only so much room in the rental truck. Some animals will not make it into the ark, and none of them line up for entry. Instead, an expedition to identify who will travel and who will be left behind. That expedition, that culling, is not primarily a matter of authors and works and ideas but selves. I trim and prune away at the books but really at me. Who do I now aspire to be? What past aspirations will I allow to own real estate in my home - the aspirations that I want to show off, either to celebrate or as cautionary reminders - and what will be cast off? It is a decision between history and prehistory. The person who I now am began at a point in time. I was other people before. Only some of those other people get to remain in biblio form. The most painful part of the process is when it requires the realization that I have not in fact been or will not in fact be that particular person I had imagined, or when it requires decisions about which live aspirations need to be put down. I am not going to learn Latin or jazz piano. Abandon those books and those wished-for selves. Cut, trim, make room for new growth.