Bibliophilia
I long ago signed up for an account on LibraryThing, but never got around to actually entering all of my books. A recent friend request from a real-life friend and coworker prompted me to revisit the site.
Taking advantage of the fact that I recently bought a barcode scanner for the sake of taking inventory of pull-tab boxes, and using it as a good excuse to further postpone other nagging responsibilities, I spent a couple hours scanning in my collection of books.
I don’t quite know when exactly my irrepressible bibliophilia began, but it was rendered forever incurable following my year-long Great Books honors class at SJU that required me to acquire 100 of the greatest books ever written.
I recently bought a couple more Office Depot, assembly-required, chipboard-and-woodgrain-sticker bookshelves on which to shelve more of my books. This afforded me the opportunity to re-arrange them a bit and find a better home for those late-comers that have been living horizontally in unbecoming places around my house.
Spending time re-arranging them is an astonishingly emotional process. I am overcome by, first and foremost, a desire to resign from all other obligations in life so that I can devour the contents of all of my books.
Just as overpowering is the sorrow that comes from knowing that I am not likely to live long or prosperously enough to find enough time to do that.
Next comes the awe at the accomplishments of humanity to have accumulated so much knowledge and so much beauty.
This is counter-weighted against the frustration at how much we have yet to learn and how many lessons we have yet to re-learn.
And while I am grateful to have effectively eight more shelves on which to properly classify my books, I find the task almost irreducible in its complexity. I frequently find myself wanting to put my books on economics next to my books on evolution, next to my books on history, next to my books on philosophy, next to my books on religion, next to my books on reason, next to my books on poetry, next to my books music, next to my books on software engineering–for indeed, the acute mind will find in each of them unique accounts of the same universal truths.
I am reminded of so many of my favorite quotes about books that are all both much wittier and pithier than anything you’ll ever hear me come up with, so I’ll shut up and instead leave you with some of the best, most obvious advice that has ever been so seldomly heeded:
“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” —Henry David Thoreau