Ode to Books

A book for me represents a future. I buy the books that I read when I can afford it. I dreamt as a child of having an extensive personal library, in which I had read every book that sits on the shelves. I dreamt of having a library of my own mind. It would be extensive with shelves and shelves of books, but also with card files of all the quotes I had written down from the books. It would have filing drawers full of essays I had read, and written. CDs of all the information radio I had heard.

This is a dream I still intend to uphold.

I love the feeling of buying a new book, it is the hope for myself. That I will become something better. That my mind will stretch further beyond any point I could have imagined. A book holds a future of thought for me, and my book reading rituals exemplify that. I buy a book, and have a special stack of books bought, and not yet read. Some of the books in the stack have been read halfway through, but remain in the stack until the last page has been finished. I mark the margins of my books, not worrying about making intelligent of even complete comments. Sometimes its just a keyword, often, Spencer. When the train of thought from the books runs parallel with, or merges with a path that my own mind has taken. After or sometimes during the reading of the book I go through all the marked passages, and copy them onto notecards. I learned this technique in my senior humanities class. A technique for writing research papers. A way of conglomerating the important parts of the book into tangible, and movable parts, like movable type, the ideas can be arranged and mixed from different sources into a new pattern and order with a different meaning. When the book is finished I put it into my bookshelves. It is a kind of celebratory ritual for me. Celebrating and embracing my new knowledge, and putting aside to rest.

Books have also become an important part of my mind. I often find myself thinking of passages that relate to the events or ideas that I encounter during the day. Depending on the situation I either quote or summarize the passage from the book, or I revisit the passage later that night, pondering on the meaning and connection. Why I made the connection at that point, and how I might be getting closer to understanding the world. I remember specifically having a conversation in my living room during my first date with my former boyfriend. And for some reason, I pulled out the book Walden and read passages to him. What a nerdy, and completely sweet and vulnerable thing for me to do.

I like to have the books after that fact for just that reason, if I have them, I go back to them, they slowly integrate into my life and my thoughts, and become a bigger part of me. Most of my books are stored at my parents home at the moment, for reasons having to do with my semi-nomadic international lifestyle at the moment. And the fact that they aren't here with me makes me sad sometimes. Not a physical sadness that would show in a facial expression, but a really deep and gentle pain and nostalgia for them. Because they are a part of me. They are a part of my mind, made permanent with ink and paper. They are a connection between me and the author that could only happen through this media, as personal sometimes as a letter between lovers. And they are a connection between me and everyone else in the world who has ever read and connected to the book. I belong then in a net of people, we don't even know who eachother are, but when we find eachother by mistake or happenstance it's like a reunion, we know that we are common to eachother, and that if only in some small way, we are connected to eachother without even having known it.