The Farm of Dead Trees
My new bookshelves are done and promptly installed by the contractor in my apartment. It has been tough replacing my wall-to-wall shelves that had been ruined by rain-water leakage. I'm wiser now about the design of these shelves: I now leave a buffer zone between ceiling and shelf.
High humidity and sunlight are books' greatest enemies. I'll have to make sure that my books are better protected this time. Yesterday, I gave my shelves a good wipe before I plan how and what books go back to them. I'm going to plan carefully this time. I'm going to install hygrometers to monitor the humidity levels better, and perhaps keep a dehumidifier running.
Since my library is the embodiment of my brain and mind, this is my opportunity to reorganise all the books so that whenever I think deeply about any subject, I can visualise the relevant books in 3D on my bookshelves. I believe if I sort out my physical books properly, my thinking will become clearer too.
Almost every one of my books has a date of purchase scrawled on the title page. Nowadays I also jot down the dates when I started and finished reading them on the back page. And if you flip though the books in my library, you'll find cafe receipts, Post-It notes and other bits of memento associated with the time and place, casually inserted into their pages. Every book in my library has been lived through and has become a part my of my life. My library is the intellectual history of my life.
By perusing every book in my possession and putting them back on the shelves, I can recall why I had bought each book in first place and if I'd read it, what memory of its contents do I still carry in my head? And if the book happens to be still unread--often because it was too difficult for my comprehension then--am I able to see its relevance now?
It gladdens me greatly whenever I find a book which I had thought difficult, now revealing itself lucidly to me. It means that my mind has matured and the intellectual soil is finally ready for these impenetrable seeds to take root and grow.
Growth and learning is the reward of reading. I live for insights and epiphanies that come from books--each discovery, a mini orgasm of the mind. Books make me happy and I do not make any apologies for preferring their company to idle socialising, which now happens anyway over the vanity fair of social media.
I wrote before in an old blog post that I see people as "interactive books". Socialising to me is a form of 'reading'. Each person is a walking book of knowledge and when we interact, we are enriching each other's lives through the sharing of our individual experiences. And the marvellous thing about it is that, our interaction is like an act of writing: we are all writing a collective book, which belongs to all of us.
If we do not read, our social pool is limited only to the living; we are not fraternising with the great minds who had come and gone before us. Reading greatly enlarges our social circle, to include the dead.
It does sound a bit morbid when I put it that way, but your personal library is your social network of the dead. You need the wisdom of both the living and the dead to lead a fulfilling life. So I read, for dead people continue to talk through the dead trees. And long may they proliferate in this farm of mine--this highly personal library filled with the voices of the dead.
