I’ve spent much time over the past few weekends trying to reorganize the dusty stacks of bankers boxes in my basement — the fabled “Bennion Archives” — into something a bit more useful, namely a kind of library, since most of those boxes contained books. And as I’ve gone about the huge task of unpacking the boxes and placing book after book onto cheap, thrift-store shelving, I’ve found myself experiencing successive waves of despair. The whole effort is driving home certain harsh realities that I’ve thought about in passing in recent years, but tried to avoid really confronting. You see, buying a book is an act of optimism in a way, because you anticipate having a future with this object: reading it, absorbing it, thinking about it, possessing it, displaying it, collecting it. It’s much like a first date, when you think about it. And I have gone on many, many first dates in the past 20 years, committed that act of optimism many, many times, because for a long time it brought me great joy to acquire more books. But just as dating begins to wear thin after a while if it never leads to anything deeper, I find the optimism and joy have largely drained out of my relationship with my books. The thing I keep thinking about now that I’m seeing them again, handling them again, is how few of my books I’ve actually read. Even worse, when I consider the ones I have read, I find my memory of them is hazy at best. Oh, I remember them as objects. In many cases, I have bright, shining memories of buying them — the location, the circumstances, who was with me at the time, the joy and rush of finding a book I’d been looking for, or that sounded like something I needed to own.

Something I needed to own. Not something I needed to read. That’s a key observation, isn’t it? But sticking to my point, of the books I have, in fact, read, I find I can’t recall what many of them were even about, beyond a simple premise  and an impression of whether or not I liked them. And that’s not how it used to be for me. I used to have a sharp memory of books I read, and movies I saw, and things I did. Not so much anymore. Now it seems like I’m already forgetting the details as soon as I’ve finished something. And I really hate that. I know my age is a factor in this. I’ve noticed lately that I can’t always find the words I want, or recall where I left my damn cellphone, and that seems perfectly normal for a busy fortysomething who has a lot of mundane demands on his mind… the same problems every fortysomething has, unless they’re the extraordinarily lucky type who have their shit together (I suspect these people are actually mythical). And I’m sure it doesn’t help that I read for a living eight or nine hours a day. There can’t be much focus left over after all that. And of course years of sleep deprivation are probably catching up with me too.

But all this is beside the point. The fact is, my relationship with books — with all the media I used to be so thoroughly immersed in, and so knowledgeable of — has changed. I’ve lost the deepness I once enjoyed, if that makes sense. And yes, it really troubles me. As I look at my library and my DVD collection and the stacks of VHS recordings I made 20 years ago, expecting to catch up someday with shows I didn’t have time to watch then — never imagining that entire decades would pass and I still wouldn’t have caught up with them — I feel overwhelmed. And sad. And more than a little foolish. There’s just too much of it all. I’ve replaced the quality of the experience with the quantity of my collections.

All of which is far more than I intended to write by way of introduction for a quote I ran across today… one of those observations that is so resonant with something you’ve been thinking or feeling, you almost feel a mechanical click somewhere inside your head when you first encounter it. Mr. W.H. Auden knew exactly what I’ve been struggling with as I shelve those books of mine, and mourn the loss of the specialness of books and other media:

“Again, while it is a great blessing that a man no longer has to be rich in order to enjoy the masterpieces of the past, for paperbacks, first-rate color reproductions, and stereo-phonograph records have made them available to all but the very poor, this ease of access, if misused — and we do misuse it — can become a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly absorb, and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind than yesterday’s newspaper.”

— Secondary Worlds (1967)

Guilty as charged. And yet, I just keep picking up more and more titles, or at least adding them to lists in the hope that I might get to them someday. Ten years ago, I basked in the pleasure of living in a time when pretty much any book or movie or TV show I could think of was — or at least soon would be — so easily available to own forever. What a ridiculous state of affairs, a true embarrassment of riches.

Spock was right. Having a thing is not so pleasing as wanting it.

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for sending me down this particular rabbit-hole.