The Library at Home
As we prepare to leave this house — and as we let prospective buyers through if they’ve heard about its future availability — Matt and I have spent many weekends organizing, purging, donating, scrubbing. Which of course included a massive tidy of some bookshelves. I know it’s likely I’ll be asked to “stage” them better — fewer books, more #decorativevases. Because as we all know (due to pox-on-society HGTV), the goal is to “remove” traces of oneself and one’s family from a home when it’s for sale. And since, in many ways, the books on our shelves tell my life’s story…out they go. But I can’t live like that in real life.
This piece in Plough by Zito Madu describes the library in his childhood home and how it helped shape him. “It was important to my parents that we also have a library at home. After years of moving around, including across continents, when we finally settled…an entire room was set aside to be the library. It was tremendously impractical with our family of eight, with everyone doubling up to fit in the limited space…The use of another bedroom would have alleviated this pressure, but my parents refused that possibility. The room was the library and that was that.”
But what about his eventual move to NYC and its space-starved apartments? He “can’t live like that in real life” either. “I needed to be surrounded, everywhere that I stayed, with these books that were doors to endless worlds. I needed the ones that I hadn’t read, and the ones that I might not ever get to read, much more than I did the ones that I had. Those books were the unknown, the unexplored dark forests — they both comfort and thrill me with the possibility that one day I might open them up and find myself among new monsters, friends, adventures, and tragedies. Even if that opening never happens, that it might happen is enough.”
The ”story of my life” isn’t just the actual books that are on the shelves. (“Oh, she likes Carol Shields.”) No, it’s more like a narrative that says I’m open to possibility, an awareness that something profound might be found within them. The good news is that even with a move (and oh my gosh, we’ve had so many), that narrative always comes with me.
originally published on instagram