Getting rid of print books — is different, now that I am old

26 July 2019

This is — I suppose — "PCSing part 3"

Parts 1 and 2 are here and here.

This last move — I decided to get rid of a bunch of books

They had filled at least five large bookshelf units.

Their volume made for too many heavy boxes.

Too many cheap bookshelves.

Too much space-taking stuff.

I have been print-book dumping all my life

Too many geographic moves to take them all with me.

Thousands must have serially perished this way.

In those days, book-reducing was painful but not ineradicable

There would always be new ones.

Now quantifiably elderly, it is different

There will not be new print ones.

It is time to small-i-fy my act. For the benefit of those who will have to clean up after my passage into disaggregated molecules.

A rumination

This time around, it is the lost knowledge (which departs with the books) that affects me.

What happens when I want to quote from one of them?

Or when I have forgotten specifics that I once knew?

And what about the loss of an author's voice, that unique delivery that made her and him appealingly who they were?

With Age, curtains close — on capability and youthful motivation

Getting rid of books is good preparation for voluntarily letting go at the end.

The moral? — bittersweet

No one is likely to test me on what the departed print volumes had to say. Mostly about the past.

And depraved human leadership is creating new disasters every day.

Being present may be enough.

Next PCS, I will not have to sigh at the sight of all those boxes. Or aggravate my creaky decrepitude, carrying them around.

Bitter and sweet.

Like most of Reality.

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