All Things Must Pass

The essentials

I moved to New York City in 2014 with only one book: Paper Lion, by George Plimpton.

All of my other books were left behind in San Francisco. I was shipping my belongings cross-country and had reduced them to fit just three large boxes and a big suitcase. That copy of Paper Lion — old when I bought it — is now in Stage 3 spinal failure. The front cover has gently detached itself from the rest of the book. It’s too fragile now for me to read (fear not; I own a few other, newer editions of the book). So it was the last one I packed in a plastic tub of books — sitting atop the rest.

I’ll figure out how I want to stitch it up next week. For now, it is like an old friend to me, an item that has been in the trenches with me longer than anything else in my possession.

Last week I wrote about the emotional process of moving apartments and deciding what to do with all of my books. They’d all served as armor for me. The stacks of them covered every flat surface in my apartment, surrounding me and looming over me no matter where I went. Emptying my shelves (and desk, and dresser, and nightstand, and kitchen table, and entryway table, and side table, and tote bags) took up time, energy, and a lot of valuable floor space.

At one point during this process, I was on the phone with a friend. “Are you wheezing?” she asked me. I’m a small, unathletic person. Dust was flying out of those pages and into my lungs. Whatever energy I would have allocated to sentimentality had to be directed toward shoving teetering towers against a wall.

I looked at my word-children, amazed by the volume and variety of them. My trusted advisors, instructors, and emotional comforts piled up until I had created a little Kowloon City of literature. A week later, I’d look at those stacks and give at least one-third of them away.

It took me four trips to get all of my giveaway books to the spot beneath the little free library in my soon-to-be-former neighborhood. I hauled heavy boxes down the street and around the corner from my apartment. Yes, I was wheezing. I was also digging these heavy boxes into my body to keep from dropping them like Kevin's Famous Chili.

In total, I took somewhere around 100 or 120 books to my little free library. My books tend to be in good condition because I read very quickly. Three-hundred pages can entertain over the course of a long afternoon. Then, the book lives on my shelf indefinitely as a monument to whatever I learned within its pages. I hope it was an all-time little free library drop. I’d walked past that little free library every day for over five years. I had taken a substantial number of books from it — and psychoanalyzed the collections that other people had left.

Over the span of the afternoon and an annoying smattering of local errands, I watched the volume of books in my boxes dwindle as people picked up their kids from school or came home from work. At one point, I sat down outside to eat an ice cream cone and watched a very hot man walk past me with a stack of books that formerly belonged to me.

I hope he enjoys and learns something interesting within this stack of books curated by a very sensitive woman. If nothing else, I hope he gets to put them on display and put that reductive and prescriptive John Waters quote to the test.

I texted my friend (the one who had asked about my wheezing) and told her I was a public servant. Get books, get perspective, maybe get laid. That’s the slogan for my campaign to be voted the most self-satisfied person in Brooklyn. I’m leading the polls by double digits.

I still own many, many books. So many books. A number of books that will definitely make my friends look at me askew and say “this… this is the downsizing effort that we had to hear about for two weeks straight?” Yes it is, thank you. Hey, have you ever read this one?

But I had been ruthless in the process of culling my books. I grappled with the concept of “need” with each embarrassing wheeze. The easiest ones to part with were the contemporary classics like Doppelganger or Uncanny Valley or Evicted or Say Nothing. These are books that I know will be easy to find secondhand (at a little free library, maybe) if I want to own a physical copy in the future.

Other offerings were books that I didn’t enjoy or had not yet read. (I actually do read some of the books that sit on my shelves unread for months or even years. I take them on vacation and then some of them become part of my permanent collection. All My Puny Sorrows waited years for its Wall of Fame induction.)

When my giveaway books were finally all hauled out of my life and onto the curb, it looked like the All-Star team of recent critically acclaimed literature. My Year of Rest and Relaxation was in one of those boxes. There were two Rachel Kushners. Some Teddy Wayne. It felt great.

I hope people took a book (or three) that they had been meaning to read. That had happened to me many times at that same little free library. I got Detransition, Baby and Such A Fun Age from that rickety little box.

I hope people took books they hadn’t heard about until then. I hope they took books they won’t read because they will make them look smart. I hope they took the books for whatever reason they feel can be fixed by walking home with a free book.

The satisfaction I felt knowing that my books will get a new chance at changing someone’s life shocked me, honestly. I had mostly been thinking about myself. I assumed I would be too emotionally attached to my physical books to give away more than a couple dozen of them. My sacrifice was originally initiated by me looking at those huge piles of books and thinking “there’s just no way I can keep all of these for myself.”

Enough! Enough! My ego had to loosen its chains in service of downsizing. Like the books, I promise you there’s still more than enough to go around in that department.

Thank you all for your service.

It helped that I made an inventory of all of my books last week. My friend helped me set up the process and I spent an entire day listing each book and marking whether I would keep it on me, send it to storage, or give it up for donation. “Don’t you have actual packing to do?” my friends asked. Yes, fine, but I was being pragmatic and organized. Actually, I was surprised by the attendant catharsis.

I have evidence of all of the books I owned until two days ago. It loosened up my emotional attachment to them, knowing that I had a record of their existence in my life if not their physical forms. Apparently knowing that they’re still with me spiritually isn’t enough. I needed evidence.

The total came out to nearly 400 books. I think the initial inventory ended at 394, but I’ve found a few more that had fallen behind a bookshelf or in a backpack or whatever. Giving away 100 of them is, objectively, a lot of books. Relatively, it’s a nice dent in the collection — at best.

At least now, when I look at my five 66 quart tubs filled with books (sorry to the moving company), I know that those are the ones that have real, specific meaning to me.

My books are going to two different places: A storage space, or my new apartment. That meant they were immediately split into a literary hierarchy. Which of them were important enough to have in my line of sight? Which are ones I’ll be happy to be reunited with in the future?

Then, I had to think about my absolute essentials box. These are the books I have to be able to see every day. That tub is filled with Elena Ferrante, Rachel Cusk, Annie Ernaux, Leslie Jamison, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Simone de Beauvoir, and Diane di Prima. And Karl Ove Knausgaard. Sue me.

The next box was for the second-tier essentials — political anthologies, David Foster Wallace, Kay Redfield Jamison, Tove Ditlevsen, Rebecca Solnit, and Michael Pollan. There were some books about writing thrown in there, too.

The third box — the first of the ones that will be sent to storage — was made up of feminist classics, books about socioeconomic conditions and mental and physical health, books about NASA, and food writing (Dan Barber, Mark Bittman, Alice Waters, Mark Kurlansky, and a book about the history of butter).

The fourth box took most of my sports books. I own very old copies of all of Roger Angell’s books. My George Plimpton anthology is in there. The Death and Life of Great American Cities is in there, too. That one would be easy to replace, but my copy has been with me for a long time and formed the bedrock of my deeply annoying urbanist principles. The off-beat ones went in there, too. Some of them are books that I haven’t read but expect that I actually will read in the future (The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the rest of Crossfire by Jim Marrs).

The books in those first two boxes — the ones that will stay with me — are books I have already read. They are my classics, and they are important to have around me. I do feel less alone when I am with books and authors whose work I know well. They’re the ones that I love like an inner-circle friend. They feel like companions.

I’ll have plenty of ways to read books I haven’t read before. The public library exists. My friend Maris often sends me home with a stack of “I know you haven’t read this, but you should” books. I’ll find the little free library in my new neighborhood — though I am really going to try to accumulate less this time. The public library exists. I own a shirt that says “Support Your Public Library.” I should become a person who transfers my literary needs to my public library!

As for the books that went out for grabs yesterday, I hope they will nobly serve their new owners. I hope there is at least one person who found something in that box that becomes a part of their permanent collection — their personal classic. Whoever claimed the Rachel Kushner collection has a pretty good chance.