From Library to Bookshelf

Well, this isn't about parenting.  Much.  But it is true that to do a decent job of parenting, you need control over the other areas of your life and the older you get the more 'leftovers' are around, in relationships, responsibilities, and clutter.  This is about the clutter.

Most academics and minister types are accustomed to accumulating books.  They serve very particular purposes and then serve as touchstones, used very rarely for actual footnotes, but for the emotional footnotes of a vague sense of accomplishment.  I look back at the marks and comments in decades old foundational books and am impressed or embarrassed by myself to varying degrees.   I find extensive notes in Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology that remind me of how I got to the theology that I have.  

Usually, as we move from one location to another, there is some culling that goes on of journals, directories, reports, and other time-bound publications.  Typically, though, we still cart the bulk of our library with us.  

And then it dawns on us that the wall is now mostly decorative, or a symbol of our learning, no matter how antiquated. 

It's now time for me to have a fairly final purge.  The internet can give me any footnote I need and I do not need to keep novels imagining that I will read them again someday.   I have two or three shelves of fiction.  Hundreds of books need to be boxed and given away.  The local library takes them, and that would be ok even though they sell most of them for pulp.   

I will keep a few that are useful:

• • Five or six hymnals currently in use.  

  • Most recent scout handbook

  • NRSV Bible

  • Two or three copies of my publications

  • Book of Church Order

  • Two or three big fat liturgical compilations

  • Tillich's Systematic Theology

If this list seems idiosyncratic, it is.  Anything else has been scanned and is commonly available online.  Your shelf will hardly apply to anyone else as well. 

This certainly does not mean that I will stop reading books.  That means I will stop keeping books.  I might just have to use the public library again.  Gosh. 

This is, of course, a metaphor for the rest of my life.  I no longer need to have such a large collection of tablet holders or titanium cups.  Arguably, my hundreds of sporks have reached some sort of collection milestone where they may have some sort of wacky value in their amazing amassment. 

This literary purge is in service to managing my own life, which is in service to another little one at the moment. 

Anyone want some books?