A whole other kind of question
Jul. 25th, 2010 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceI have emptied two whole boxes, hurrah! Two big boxes. Of which I would now like to declutter my house, but I guess I ought to hang on to them in anticipation of doing this-all again the other way around, emptying the living-room into the dining-room. *makes little feeble exhausted sound*
I am tired already, but I have a question. If we assume - as I think we must - that this collection of cookbooks is personal to me and has no archival value, that it is not a Collection in any serious sense, is there any point beyond my vanity in hanging on to books that I am never actually going to use? Collecting for collecting's sake is a vanity in every sense, but people make and keep collections regardless. People collect snuff-boxes, who never take snuff. Cookbooks happened to me by accident, as the best collections do; I didn't even realise I had a collection, until it was almost too large to shelve and order.
Which is, of course, the problem. My house is really not large enough, and winnowing would make everything more manageable. Books-I-will-never-use seems like a place to begin. But that's the first step on a very scary road. If I don't need to keep that cookbook, then I don't need to keep this novel I will never read again; which being true, then I don't really need to keep this other novel which I can borrow from the Lit & Phil if ever I do want to read it again; which being true...
Etc, etc. My vanity is terrified. It has looked into the abyss, and there are no books down there.
I am tired already, but I have a question. If we assume - as I think we must - that this collection of cookbooks is personal to me and has no archival value, that it is not a Collection in any serious sense, is there any point beyond my vanity in hanging on to books that I am never actually going to use? Collecting for collecting's sake is a vanity in every sense, but people make and keep collections regardless. People collect snuff-boxes, who never take snuff. Cookbooks happened to me by accident, as the best collections do; I didn't even realise I had a collection, until it was almost too large to shelve and order.
Which is, of course, the problem. My house is really not large enough, and winnowing would make everything more manageable. Books-I-will-never-use seems like a place to begin. But that's the first step on a very scary road. If I don't need to keep that cookbook, then I don't need to keep this novel I will never read again; which being true, then I don't really need to keep this other novel which I can borrow from the Lit & Phil if ever I do want to read it again; which being true...
Etc, etc. My vanity is terrified. It has looked into the abyss, and there are no books down there.