A response to Jonathan Bennett’s back (book?) pain
Jonathan, I’m glad you’re moving house, truly. Because I know what it means to move house. And city. And country. Trust me, it’s not a logistical decision, it’s an existential calling.
While you’ve built what you call a “shrine to forsaken intentions,” I have carefully constructed an elaborate fire escape to my own private Hogwarts, with occasional layovers in Narnia, Middle-earth, and the Mughal court. I have libraries and mini-libraries in all the places I’ve lived, which is to say, all the homes that technically belong to my parents, my in-laws, or Airbnb hosts who didn’t check the cupboards after I left.
Yes, it’s an expensive habit (I wonder if any of my habits are inexpensive). But also deeply autobiographical. Every time I pack my books, I rediscover a past self I didn’t know I missed: the one who thought she’d become fluent in Spanish over the summer, or the one who believed she could grasp Derrida on a Sunday morning. The title does mention that I am delusional.
At one point, I used to deem those unread books as my personal failures. Now, I realize they’re time capsules…receipts of a self who once tried, existed, hoped, and bought a bundle of books during a spate of identity crises and 40% off sales. Okay, 80%.
There was a time (ah, teenage!) when I and a few fellow bibliomaniacs made solemn vows: we would not, could not, buy new books until we had read the ones we already owned. We lasted maybe two weeks. Pocket money went not on dates or samosas, but on second-hand manifestos, and overpriced illustrated editions of Rumi, and philosophers whose names we couldn’t pronounce without guessing the continent first. We grew older. Started earning. And hoarding again. Only now, we call it “curation.”
But I won’t call it hoarding. That’s a vulgar word. What I practice is the dignified art of literary patronage. Inside my head, I am the benevolent queen of an imaginary land and these books are my chosen court of poets, philosophers, and lunatics. Outside my head, of course, I’m a caffeine-dependent woman with too many totes and two copies of The Second Sex, both in different homes and neither of which I’ve finished.
There are books I will never lend. There are books I pretend I’ve read. And there are books that I love so much, I keep in triplicate, just in case something happens to the first two copies (I have no idea if anything can actually happen to them).
Why do I keep collecting though? Maybe because these books give me what real life doesn’t: a certain richness. Aesthetic joy. The feeling that I’m surrounded by quality even when I’m in sweatpants and existential dread. Once upon a time, I used them as an escape from overly hot Indian summers, stuffy classrooms with bullies and self-appointed judges of coolness. Now, they help me dodge the Canadian winter chill and make me wonder whether the Indian summers I once escaped were actually paradise in disguise.
Google can give me information. ChatGPT can give me summaries. But neither can replicate the feeling of opening a book that smells like hope, ambition, and nostalgia. My collection is very me…messy, uncategorizable, and kinda irreplaceable.
I don’t know when it happened, somewhere between trying to build a future and running from the past, but my library became more than just storage. It became manifestation. Proof that the person I’m becoming still believes in becoming.
The kind of weightlifting I do
God help anyone who tries to reorganize my shelves. (Hint: mom)
God help the movers. (Hint: dad)
And God help me because I just bought another one. (And another and another…)
