A Book Without Rooms

"Ah, yes." I aspirate as I look at my six volumes of The Modern Library Classics edition of In Search of Lost Time (formally translated as A Remembrance of Things Past) by that madeleine-loving, cork-lined-room-inhabiting, literary-giant Marcel Proust.

"Ah, yes" is a typical sigh of mine. I am thirty years old, overweight, gay, Midwestern, anxious, loquacious, and, maybe most of all, seemingly incapable of cracking open a book and reading it. I suppose I consider myself shallow. Over the years, I have collected a number of works from museum and library book sales, yard sales, Goodwill browsing, and the like with the earnest desire to maybe, someday read one of these books. And I had curated quite a library by the time I went to college. I hauled these aspirational reads with me. By the time I was out of college and living back at home (ah, yes,) I had doubled my "to-read" collection. And then when I moved to Saint Louis, I carried that with me only to cull fifty percent of it when I moved back in with my folks. And by the time I was living in NYC, I could only bring so much with me as I moved in with two large suitcases. That tiny Brooklyn apartment became laden with newly acquired aspirational reads which sat in mute witness staring at me as I spent the lion's share of my free-time on Twitter and Vine. I mean... there was some vain attempt to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but that was mostly to prove some kind of point to myself that lasted about seven minutes before giving way to my general indolence.

And then I was laid off from my start-up job in Brooklyn and evicted from my apartment when I could no longer afford the exorbitant fee of living in a shoebox so close to the G train. And about ninety-five percent of that library was purged. I set up a book cart with all of my literature in it as I was clearing out the apartment which I left outside on the curb. By the time I come outside to push it to the used bookstore, I find that every volume has been thrown in the trash cans and the little IKEA RÅSKOG has been taken by some passerby. This is not an altogether rare sight in NYC. It was pretty naïve of me to think I could leave my curated books outside housed in such a valuable, precious object as a $29.99 IKEA RÅSKOG. But I can't exactly shake a fist at philistines. I, after all, hadn't exactly broke the spines of many of these books. Hastily, I grabbed some books from the top of the trash cans -- an anthology of the works of Freud edited by Peter Gay, Mortimer Adler's How To Read a Book (A book I've read yet whose application has somewhat escaped me,) and my worn copy of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology. 

But, yes! Ah! yes. I had saved my six volumes of Proust from the destruction by handing those off to my sister well before I had to move out. And even then, it felt deeply self-indulgent. Even now, it feels self-indulgent! I am living back in my home state of Illinois (actually in the same town where I went to college,) and my library is much more meager. I have the Proust, the Adler, the Masters, Ulysses by James Joyce (aspirational window-dressing par excellence,) the Freud, several comic books, and some fluff reading on my Kindle (yes, I have tried many gimmicks to get me to read.) And a Bible despite my ferocious agnosticism.

And basically the only books I have finished in the past ten years have been audiobooks. While working at the start-up, I had gotten into the habit of listening to biographies, self-help books, novels, non-fiction, and essays -- all narrated by someone with an interesting enough voice to mitigate boredom. I don't think there is anything wrong with this, per se, but I do think it illustrates well that I don't prioritize reading in and of itself. I have relegated it to background noise, and I am pretty self-conscious about that.

So... yes. Ah, yes. Here I am. It is the turning of a new year, and, as ever, I have a pile of aspirations and a collection of tangible desires. I want to spend the new year writing more, drawing more, just in general creating more... as well... as reading at all. I dunno! I feel I need to work on input if I'm interested in output. You need fuel to keep the fires burning after all.

This blog, then, will be a place where I reflect on what I am trying to do. It's a book without rooms, in a sense. That phrase is a subversion of a Cicero quote:

"A room without books is like a body without a soul." 

The quip means that you can't make a good home without books, whereas I've never exactly felt at home in a book? You know what I mean? I understand that you navigate it from start to finish, but it sometimes feels like a long hallway and the floor plan doesn't make immediate sense to me. It's like the Winchester mansion almost -- more of a cacophony of space than hearth and home. And, yes, I am a terrible reader. But finding yourself in a place where your thoughts and ideas animate has historically been the purview of books for centuries. To think about things through writing and reading can illuminate what we believe and know in a more mindful way (especially if you're a chatty cathy like me! Good god, you should try sitting next to me at a movie! Oof!) I guess what I'm saying is I want to better familiarize myself with the architecture of reading and writing in general, and a new year is a good place to start.

Maybe this is all kind of rarefied or highfaluting, but I am trying to take the curse off of it by writing about it. I want to make up for all of this book-toting and window dressing of my past-self and start to take ownership of my own ideas and reading habits. I want to be a bit more cogent than my Twitter stream. I want to really try to break down ideas and start to digest them in a meaningful way. And I want to tackle some stuff which now seems kinda daunting. I want to read Proust instead of just owning a paperback collection of his stuff. I want to have better clarity as to why stuff like this still lingers on in culture. And, honestly... I'd like to start my own writings instead of just sitting on ideas. I don't want my hopes to just become stacks of dime store novels I carry with me from room to room emptily and without action.

I want to build rooms wherein I can start to make sense. And that's gonna start here. Not sure what this is gonna look like in a year, but maybe it will all cohere in a nifty way. Well, maybe. Ah... yes.