Sunset years

For some reason, today I recalled an episode (a recurring episode actually) from childhood that I hadn't thought about in ages.

Imagine myself as a small boychild, smart but hardly differentiated from the world around him.  Raise him in the formica and spaceships and Danish Modern of suburban Chicago, 1965 or so.  Then transplant him to a country inn somewhere in New Hampshire that was full of decrepit German Jews, smelling funny and reading foreign newspapers. This was a vacation trip I was dragged on for some good number of years, as we made an annual pilgrimage to the East Coast to visit my grandparents who lived in Brookline, MA.  They and their friends congregated at this resort called Besin's, which (unlike the rest of my universe) was emphatically not aimed at children.

I honestly have no real memory of what I felt there, but it must of been some mixture of boredom and the sheer stark terror of being in the vicinity of death.  Something a seven-year old would have not the slightest knowledge of, but the quality is of such a magnitude as to be felt in the bones, in the very fabric of the cosmos.

I can't imagine what prompted me to think of these summers of boredom and the nearly dead, except that tomorrow is my last day of work at [prestigious research institution].

Intellectual Archaeology

One thing you can say in favor of electronic books – they don't have to be stored in the garage because of lack of shelf space, so they don't get used as nesting material by the local rodent population. I spent much of the past weekend mucking the rat poop out of the garage, and in the process needed to carefully examine each precious volume as I removed it from one chewed-up box into a new and hopefully impenetrable plastic one.

It's like doing archeology on one's self, every past interest is there, like shards of pottery, buried in a succession of layers. Every time I do this (during moves or major housecleanings or emergencies like this) I re-sort them, based on vague criterion of how they fit together (like "professional" vs other, but in fact I work as hard as I can to blur that line, so that doesn't really work very well). Some even make it to a box to sell or donate, but not very many this time since what remain after the last few filters are those I can't make myself part with. A few get pulled out to give to my children, but they are at the stage of where they would rather find their own books.

It is difficult to pretend that all these books, all these abandoned directions of thought, represent a coherent project, that I was after something during all that time I was accumulating them. Yet there is something that ties them all together, even if it's only my personal history. That is rather disordered, to be sure, but it's not nothing.

I guess I continue to cart around these obsolete chunks of dead trees because they do in some weird way constitute a large chunk of my identity. And just like the part of myself that lives in the head, they are falling victims to decay, to the the depradations of nature and time.