Library distillation

Perhaps it is the darker months, the long night time hours in which there is little better to do than sit and think and read, but I have been thinking a lot about my library. I wrote earlier this year about converting my dining room into a library, and we did this and it’s been an enormous success. It is a wonderful room. A room for sitting and reading and writing in. A room for discussions or calm contemplation. It is one of the best things we ever did, and it’s made our house a complete home for me.

There is, of course, still a limitation on space and though I have a library the library has only so many shelves and those shelves are pretty full. Early on I set myself a 1 book in 1 book out rule, though I haven’t stuck to it. An unexpected bonus (I think) of creating the library has been that my husband has started to read more, and we now have a stack of sci-fi books messing up my shelves which really ought to be integrated. I am not always the most giving of people, but affording my husband some shelf space in the library is a small sacrifice I find myself willing to make if it means that we can spend the cold winter evenings snuggled in the warmth of the library reading together.

This means that I need to free up some space. Despite having a whole shelf of space available when we created the library over summer, this has been swallowed up with new books. And there are more to come. I have been borrowing Virginia Woolf books from the library, but find myself wanting to complete a collection. There are the inevitable new books I can’t resist buying and though I use the lending library more the idea that there aren’t future classics out there that I will want to own is a silly one. I know I have a growing collection of non-fiction to accommodate. All this, and still a limited amount of space.

Perhaps it is the long winter months, or perhaps it is a side-effect of my advancing age. I’m not sure. But I have been thinking a lot recently about distilling my library into those books I want to keep for all time. This is a bit of a shift for me. I have been, for as long as I can remember, a seasoned consumer of books. I have read often, widely, I have been a follower of contemporary fiction and I have always been prepared to try something new (though I draw the line at 50 Shades of Grey, Twilight, Lee Child and Scandinavian crime novels. Everyone has limits). What I’m starting to realise is that I can try but not buy. There are these amazing innovations called libraries, they are wonderful places. If I’ve not read a book, I will not buy it. I will try it first. If I love it, if I will read it again, then it can secure a future place in my library. This strikes me as quite a groundbreaking idea.

I look at my shelves full of books and I think I have been brutal about strimming them down but I haven’t. I haven’t been truly honest about the relationship with all those books on my shelves. For a start, there are many books on my shelves I haven’t read. Perhaps some of them I’ll never read (I’m looking at you, Gravity’s Rainbow). Some of them I’ve hung onto because I have a full set even though I didn’t really like them. That accounts for Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy, and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time which I know I’m never going to get past the first book of (I tried, I became extremely bored). I have a full set of Murakami novels including 1Q84 which I hated, amongst others. Will I read them again? It’s unlikely. Why, then, am I holding onto them?

I realise, now, that I want my library to be full of books that are treasured to me. I want every book by Tove Jansson, including the full set of Moomins, because I have loved every pixel on every page of them. I want space to place the nice editions of George Eliot’s books that I’ll eventually acquire. There needs to be space for my Virginia Woolfs, for my Muriel Sparks for my Evie Wylds. There needs to be space for H is for Hawk (I have hinted heavily), Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan series, everything by Yoko Ogawa. I can only create the space by being brutal.

There have been a lot of people recently talking about reading less, about re-reading more. Perhaps it is the influence of winter, of darkness, that pushes us back to the familiar, the friendly novel that you know will make you feel cosy and comforted. I know I feel like that. I’ve enjoyed reading Woolf immensely, but it is also nice to turn back to a familiar friend, to lose myself again amongst its pages. Fortunately Woolf is starting to feel like a familiar friend. At this time of year, I often re-read The Dark is Rising sequence, a series I have loved since I was a girl. There are few things that have been with me so long. Yet it isn’t in my library. How weird. It should be.

I can list the books that I own that I want to re-read again. The list wouldn’t be hugely long. It would include Woolf, Eliot, Bronte. It would include Kawabata, Laxness, Coetzee. There are more of course, but not a huge number. Perhaps it will be possible to free up that space after all.

Interlude: walking to the museum to look at the frogs

In the city where I work there is a museum; in fact there is more than one museum, but in this particular case I am not concerned with the Museum of Science and Industry, nor the People’s History Museum, nor the Museum of Football however good each of those museums might be. No, there is a Museum of Natural History (with capitals) which is near the university in the student district and at the museum, unlike the others, there are frogs.

The museum is a good twenty minute walk, at a decent pace, from my office, which means that if I speed there and back I have ten minutes in the museum and ten minutes to eat lunch. It’s a constructive use of my lunch hour; combining physical exercise and intellectual stimulation in equal measure, not just from those lush ten minutes in the museum but also from the mental stimulation that walking itself brings. When I walk, I think. I doubt I am the first person to notice this.

The inevitable mammoth skeleton

The Natural History Museum is a fascinating building and there are lots of interesting things to discover within its walls. It has, as all museums of its type do, the inevitable dinosaurs, the cases of skewered insects, the Egyptian caskets, displays of ancient weapons and coins. But though those things are all interesting, and if I had hours to spend I would spend them exploring every inch of the displays, the reason I walk so determinedly to the museum is to deposit myself in the small section hidden deep within the labyrinthine corridors with a vivarium of living frogs and snakes and lizards.

I should interject here to say that I am not a big fan of keeping creatures locked up behind glass or in cages. Still, I visit the frogs.

Frog observing frog

I have an affinity for frogs. Of course it is ridiculous to say I have an affinity for frogs, I cannot have a real, true affinity but that’s how it feels. There is something about them; their soft, slick bodies, rubbery-limbed,  the way they move in that way that is simultaneously fluid and jerky and which we describe so childishly as a ‘hop’ though you only have to watch a frog for a few moments to understand how inadequate a description that is. I love how they sit so still, observing with their tiny wet pebble eyes whatever it is that they observe and how, when you look into them, the bare truth of our inability to understand another being, be it frog or cat or chimp or human, becomes transparent.

Am I contented?

I cannot see into the mind of a frog. I look into their froggy eyes and though I can believe that there is an intelligence behind there, that there is clearly something which decides to move, that chooses this branch over another, which mates according to some criteria of preference, that hunts this insect and not that, the concept of understanding is a gulf I cannot breach. Why then do I think I can breach that gulf in other creatures? I know of people who claim knowledge of their pet’s state of mind: ‘my cat is contented’, ‘my dog is scared’ and perhaps these things are true, but in observing this I also observe the sheer gulf that occurs between humans in understanding motivation and action. I have seen, as a woman, how words and ideas will be placed in my mouth: I won’t travel for my job, I wear the clothes I do for the benefit of male gaze, I like football, I like shopping, I’m not ambitious, I live to serve. The gulf between who I am and who people think I am is huge. This is before we enter into that vague space in which my own understanding of my own identity resides. No doubt I make the same error, jumping to conclusions which are unfounded, and I think this illusion, that we can look into the eyes of another and understand them is somehow at fault. Of course I am at fault too.

In an infinity of greenery, there are frogs

What I have learned from the frogs is this: you cannot know anything about anyone else without inquisitiveness and interaction. You cannot know someone’s intentions, their desires or dreams or aspirations, without asking them. You cannot infer the mind of a person from what you see with your eyes: surely illusionists, physicists and movie makers have demonstrated to us clearly enough that the information we receive via our eyes must be treated with caution. My son has a condition called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, and when it flares the way he sees the world is altered in such a way that he lacks the language, even at fourteen years old, to properly describe it. Is his ‘altered’ perception wrong or right? How do I ever really know that his perception is the same as mine?

I can’t, is the answer. Or as reliable an answer as I can give. This is where language fails and strives, in the infinite gulf between experience and description. There are no words. Perhaps that’s what the point of the museum is: to unfold for us through image, through artefact, through encounter how tenuous and rare and special and flimsy our desire to see and be seen really is.