My children don’t read books. I accepted, long ago, that one day they would have to call a bookseller to dispose of my library. When my mother died, I understood why. I had thought I loved her books (she was a writer too) but of course it was her I loved and, like her clothes, they were empty without her. The background of every room she had occupied, they had mattered when she was alive because she mattered. I kept a few that were closest to her heart and a dealer took away the rest.
Many books have passed through my own library; some stayed. I still have the Richard Brautigan novels that inspired me as a teenager. F. Scott Fitzgerald, too, Conan Doyle and Camus, and so many more I wouldn’t part with. Others stayed a few years, nourishing something I was working on, before passing out of my hands. Most detective stories lasted no longer than the sandwich I ate while reading them on some journey. Some were gulped down, some waited to thirty years to be read; others still wait their time. Some have been read whole, others dipped into. And there are those to which I’ve turned time and again.
On my shelves, books are the mirror of my mind. Unlike a public library, organised according to a scientific system, they make no sense to anyone but me. And so, when the time comes, they will be released into the wild, some lost, others discovered and tamed by new readers who will make libraries in their own image.
One response to “What is a library?”
[…] impatient with the vague reflections I offer here, and I can understand why. What, after all, have libraries, late style and the self to do with community art and co-creation? Who cares if I believe that the […]