Many partings
Feb. 9th, 2012 03:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceThere is, apparently and to nobody's surprise, a hierarchy of avoidance. Tax and money issues can be avoided by sorting books. The sorting of books can be avoided by building boxes to take the books. The building of boxes can be avoided by writing new text. The writing of text can be avoided by reading the internets. Guess where I am now?
England, on the other hand, is doing its best to hasten my departure. It offers incentives to go: specifically, it is being as vile as it knows how. We have that freezing rain again, which is bitter cold in the face and soaking in the clothes and lethal underfoot. Unpredictably lethal, which is worse: the same stretch of tarmac can be damp and grippy one moment, then suddenly ice the next. Without visible change or reason. I have been all the way to the supermarket and back, and never want to leave the house again except for ever.
In some ways, it's the more recent acquisitions book-wise that are hardest to leave behind me. I always thought I'd bequeath my books to the Lit & Phil, but I did think I'd be dead when it came to take them. As it is, I guess I'm undead, and so having to deliver them myself. But the ones I really want to keep and can't find an excuse for are the Chinese library, the Crusader library, the research texts that I ought to be done with. I won't write about Outremer again, most likely, nor Taishu. But - yeah. It's hard to let these go. Books by friends I am shedding left and right, books that were friends themselves in the long-ago; these, though? These are embedded in a different way, part of the archive. [And, oh damn, the archive. Still haven't figured out what to do with that.]
Still. I just packed up Georgette Heyer. It took no time at all, and felt wonderfully warming: all that contentment, past and to come, contained within a single simple box. I'm still sorry that I read Jane Aiken Hodge's biography of her, because it reduced my opinion of both writers - but that doesn't affect the books.
Now I suppose I should do something more difficult. Le sigh.
In other news, tomorrow will be Mac's turn at the dentist. All those nightly flossing-games with String haven't done him the least bit of good, apparently. Me, I have to go back in a couple of weeks for yet another crown. Talk about the Crowned Heads of Europe; I embody them all. *snarls at his own dentition, wincingly*
England, on the other hand, is doing its best to hasten my departure. It offers incentives to go: specifically, it is being as vile as it knows how. We have that freezing rain again, which is bitter cold in the face and soaking in the clothes and lethal underfoot. Unpredictably lethal, which is worse: the same stretch of tarmac can be damp and grippy one moment, then suddenly ice the next. Without visible change or reason. I have been all the way to the supermarket and back, and never want to leave the house again except for ever.
In some ways, it's the more recent acquisitions book-wise that are hardest to leave behind me. I always thought I'd bequeath my books to the Lit & Phil, but I did think I'd be dead when it came to take them. As it is, I guess I'm undead, and so having to deliver them myself. But the ones I really want to keep and can't find an excuse for are the Chinese library, the Crusader library, the research texts that I ought to be done with. I won't write about Outremer again, most likely, nor Taishu. But - yeah. It's hard to let these go. Books by friends I am shedding left and right, books that were friends themselves in the long-ago; these, though? These are embedded in a different way, part of the archive. [And, oh damn, the archive. Still haven't figured out what to do with that.]
Still. I just packed up Georgette Heyer. It took no time at all, and felt wonderfully warming: all that contentment, past and to come, contained within a single simple box. I'm still sorry that I read Jane Aiken Hodge's biography of her, because it reduced my opinion of both writers - but that doesn't affect the books.
Now I suppose I should do something more difficult. Le sigh.
In other news, tomorrow will be Mac's turn at the dentist. All those nightly flossing-games with String haven't done him the least bit of good, apparently. Me, I have to go back in a couple of weeks for yet another crown. Talk about the Crowned Heads of Europe; I embody them all. *snarls at his own dentition, wincingly*