the ghost library
Jan. 8th, 2008 05:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnashBefore Hurricane Katrina, I had a lot of books. Several thousand. And I knew all of them. Oh, I couldn't sit down and list off everything in my library - but I could look at a book and instantly tell you if I had a copy of it or not. I had a mental card catalog of the whole thing.
I still do.
I can go into a bookstore and run my gaze over the shelf, and the instant I process a book's title, I know: I have this, I don't have this, I don't have this and I think I might like to have it. Except... now I don't know. The vast majority of the 'I have this' results get a big question mark added to them, after a second. None of the books I lost to the hurricane ever got marked in my head as 'gone'.
My head is full of the ghosts of books. And every ghost lies uneasy: I don't know, with the surety that I know I once had a book, if it was one of the ten percent that were at my mother's place instead of in that ill-fated shipping container. And after I puzzle that out, I have to wrestle with deciding how much it meant to me, and if it meant enough to decide to get it again, instead of picking up something exciting and new.
Every trip to a bookstore brings some of these ghosts back to haunt me. Places that used to be a wonderful mine of potential and possibility have become full of a thousand tiny little aches of loss. The storm flooded my catalog, and every time I open one of its drawers and reach in, I find something dead and rotting.
I still do.
I can go into a bookstore and run my gaze over the shelf, and the instant I process a book's title, I know: I have this, I don't have this, I don't have this and I think I might like to have it. Except... now I don't know. The vast majority of the 'I have this' results get a big question mark added to them, after a second. None of the books I lost to the hurricane ever got marked in my head as 'gone'.
My head is full of the ghosts of books. And every ghost lies uneasy: I don't know, with the surety that I know I once had a book, if it was one of the ten percent that were at my mother's place instead of in that ill-fated shipping container. And after I puzzle that out, I have to wrestle with deciding how much it meant to me, and if it meant enough to decide to get it again, instead of picking up something exciting and new.
Every trip to a bookstore brings some of these ghosts back to haunt me. Places that used to be a wonderful mine of potential and possibility have become full of a thousand tiny little aches of loss. The storm flooded my catalog, and every time I open one of its drawers and reach in, I find something dead and rotting.