My friend Tim has prompted me to make a confession.
It is high time I came 'out of the closet'...and confessed to the world...
I am a collector of books...
but very SELDOM a reader!
I AM an avid ARCHIVER, who has read only a FRACTION of his collection!
In a way- I am a fraud.
I admit it.
I just LOVE buying books, and putting them on shelves!
I love collecting them, leafing through them, reading snippets of them...but so very rarely do I read them right through!
I feel a twinge of guilt when I hear of others voraciously devouring the written word...
Those who work the golden seam of knowledge, creativity, ideas...
The eternal dialogue.
I write plenty of my own words...but seldom absorb others.
I confess, there is a part of me that worries that the writing of others might somehow dilute my own work- take something away from my own voice.
That I might start to sound like someone else.
It has taken me a LIFETIME to find my own inner voice...
to listen to it...
LET ALONE to record it with any kind of accuracy!!
I have a latent fear (i guess from childhood conditioning) of being a copy-cat- so I resist the influence of others, that my own style might remain pure.
I have a feeling that the words I have read to date have furnished me with the sufficient tools for carrying out the art or writing satisfactorily, & the only task remaining is to hone my own voice, and retain it's integrity, it's purity.
If it might indeed boast such a thing.
But my sense of 'integrity' feels somehow challenged when I look at my vast army of untried, untested pulp & ink soldiers.
Why do I do it?
It has to be more than some sense of artistic sanitation.
It HAS to be.
Even the greatest writers dip into the words of others at regular intervals.
Why don't I??
Because I think also, at my core- I am strictly a book aesthete.
I cannot bear the thought of an abandoned book.
I never could.
Nothing breaks my heart more than a book in a bin.
I don't care what it is...what subject, matter...I have to rescue it.
I cannot bear to be in a shop, and see a bargain...a book that is beautiful, in it's first run, in good condition, obviously of substance, fairly cheap, one that I will likely never read...
and allow it to just sit there!!
A recent purchase of a beautiful mint condition edition of the life of George Gershwin...
I have only a passing interest and acquaintance with the man and his work...
& yet for a dollar I simply HAD to give it a home!!
My home is an orphanage for abandoned books!
A repository of ideas!
I cannot handle a volume without thinking...
"My GOD!! The work that went into this! The man hours devoted to fashioning such a wonderful piece of art! THIS IS A SLICE OF SOMEONES EXISTENCE!"
And I have to take it home with me.
I am a HOARDER of the printed page!
My first job was a Librarian- perhaps I am still one!
Like the character in the Brautigan book
The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966
a man whose home was a 7/11 repository for the collective unconscious- a place for occasional scribes to submit their work for storage...
In the name of posterity...
A safe deposit box of true wealth.
A bank of beauty.
I delight in it...and yet somehow, carry a certain degree of shame!
Like I am somehow a kind of fraud!
Freud suggested that abused children 'collect' things and surround themselves in an attempt to hold onto...something...
we line our shelves with them, as a kind of protective wall against the oppressive, cruel outside world. We live in a cave fashioned of our own sense of beauty...
insulated by friendly non toxic material- the one place we can function.
We line our living space with materials that will remain; that will not desert, or let us down.
And books will never do that.
People let me down constantly, so I have given up relying on them; but books NEVER do.
Whether it is an illness, an addiction, or just plain glorious madness...
I simply LOVE books.
My name is John; & I'm a biblioholic...
