Old Books and Other Musings

Picking up some pointers.

Last week I made a run to my little West Texas hometown of Alpine, seven and a half hours west of Houston.  Officially I was picking up some furniture for the friend in whose house I’m living.  Unofficially I was having a great time with all my old friends.  Much fun ensued and I’ll be writing about some of it, including a great visit with author Katie Arnoldi.

As a strange counterpoint to meeting Katie and hearing about her work, one of my friends had a little get-together during which we tore up books.  I never could get my head around exactly what we were going to be doing and kept referring to it as a book burning, which it wasn’t.  For many years while I lived in Alpine I volunteered weekly at the library bookstore.  A project of the Friends of the Library, Re-Reads sells books that are donated as well as those no longer needed in the library.  A valuable source of income, Re-Read brings in about $1,000 a month.

Books wend their way through the system, first on the library shelves, then on the shelves at Re-Reads and finally on the table at periodic “buy ‘em by the bag” book sales.  If a book makes it through the cycle without finding a new home, it has to go to the recycling center.

Destroying books is a touchy subject.  One of our friends refused to participate, saying she just didn’t think she could tear up a book.  Once years ago I was doing some work in an old high school whose library had closed and whose books, although still on the shelves at the time, were being thrown out.  I was aghast and, unable to rescue them all, snuck one copy of P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste out the door under my coat.  I’ve since become more realistic and, fast-forward to last week, agreed to join in this task of book destruction.

Along with some eating and drinking, at this gathering we were prepping the rejected books for recycling.  The covers had to be torn off and thick books reduced to 1” sections. It was hot, sweaty, filthy work made somewhat better with grapefruit margaritas and lots of laughing over romance novels, relationship advice books and scholarly tomes, all being consigned to the paper pulp pile.

While we were demolishing these books I was considering the end game of the author’s work.  Someone poured their energy, their creativity, their time and their spirit into these words that we were laughingly mocking and tearing apart. It’s a little sad.  Whether we’re William Shakespeare or Barbara Cartland, all those words we’re churning out have a finite shelf life.  Some last longer than others but at some point no one cares anymore and all those words go into the hopper.

As a huge, symbolic analogy of the arc of anyone’s life’s work, what’s the lesson?  Not to take ourselves so seriously?  To stop and smell the roses?  Don’t leave clearing out our junk to our children?  I’m not sure.  I’d hate it if the lesson was, “stop trying so hard or caring so much, it’s all going to be trash eventually anyway”.  I think we have to do the best we can for ourselves, regardless of whether or not anyone else cares or for how long.

On another note, I was struck by the thought that if someone came along and took a picture of all of us out in my friend’s backyard laughing and drinking and tearing up books they could slap a nasty caption on it and do some damage.  Makes you wonder about certain other pictures out there in the world with reality-stretching captions that we’re sometimes too eager to believe.