Over the past week I have taken more than fifty plastic bags of books to the recycling center. Each time the feeling is just as liberating. When you have carried something with you for decades and then are able to give it up without hesitation or regret, you know you have matured a little. For a book easily becomes a fetish, and often it is an extension of the self.
In a certain sense, your bookshelf is your portrait. It tells people what and what kind of person you are. Just as young men buy used BMWs as their first cars. Now I am a BMW man!
As a child, when I borrowed a book from the library, I was at first under the impression that the library lady might quiz me on it. That was why every book had to be read from beginning to end, whether it was good or bad. That illusion, of course, soon disappeared, but it took me until adulthood to free myself from the idea that a book must be finished whether I liked it or not.
A Book in the Fridge
It took even longer to realize that a book, too, can be thrown in the trash. There was something sacred about a book. Preserving it for future generations was the duty of every literate person. I was living in Stockholm, Sweden, then, and someone gave me a novel that I found not merely badly written and stupid, but downright repulsive.
First, on a whim that Freud might perhaps have been able to explain, I put it in the refrigerator: there you are, serves you right. It felt so good—until a friend noticed it there and looked at me as if there were something wrong with my head. “Oh, so you think it’s a bad book? Och det är därför i kylskåpet?”
I realized that the proper place for rejected books is not the refrigerator. Where, then? The next day I took it to the building’s garbage bin. That felt even better. As if I had freed myself from something that had slithered into me and was doing its work inside me.
Since then I have been spiritually free to throw a book in the trash. Of course, a good book that you do not intend to keep is worth giving away, because for someone it may contain the answer to some question of life with which he or she is struggling just then. But what about a book in which you see nothing good? Is putting it back into circulation not a little like dropping a torn sock into a charity collection bin?
The Bookshelf Is Part of Identity
A few weeks ago I looked at my bookshelves and no longer recognized myself in them. My books, a large part of them, seemed to speak of what I was twenty, thirty, or forty years ago. Only some of them reflected what I am now, or what I am becoming.
There were fine books there that had once answered to my interests, but of which I knew that I would never read them again. I had already received from them what I was going to receive. Nor would my descendants want them on their shelves. Why would they?
For few books have something to say across generations. Some book may once have been an answer to something for me, but my children no longer have that same question. Their questions are different, because they arise from different soil.
Books Grow Old with Their Reader
To me, many popular novels already feel dated ten years after their publication. Perhaps even especially the most popular ones.
Often they are popular precisely because they were born around some topical theme, question, or experience. Then the media praise them to the skies, and their popularity becomes great.
Nonfiction books, too, age quickly nowadays. Especially in books on the natural sciences, the facts often become outdated within a few years. In the social sciences as well, the discussion moves on, and few contributions are so profound that one wants, or needs, to return to them again and again. Of course such books exist too, but not many.
Why, then, should I keep on my shelves books I have outgrown? As monuments to my former identity?
When, from time to time, you remove from your life what no longer carries, its shelves become denser, refined like a diamond as it is cut and polished. The carats diminish, but the brilliance grows.
