Packing Books: Worlds, Riches, An Enormous Number of Clowns: by Elizabeth Stark

I moved this weekend, rather suddenly. Of course, I’d been thinking and planning the move for a while, but the timing was in question and then suddenly we found the perfect house and got it and started paying rent and so of course we had to move!

Moving means, alas, getting everything you want to take with you (along with everything you might like to jettison but don’t have time to purge) into boxes to transport. Since I’ve been living in the house my father lived in for the last 35 years of his life, I had not only my own oversized collection of books but also my father’s oversized collection of books to examine and to box for taking or for selling.

It should come as no surprise to you, but of course it surprises me still, the way book effect me. Books I’ve carried around for twenty years and not yet read still have a thrilling sense of possibility. They contain wisdom! Answers! Stories! Who would give that away? And the books I have read and already love–those are old friends. Can’t shove them out without consequence.

I teach with books. I write books. And most of all, I read books. But this week, what I did more than any of those things was to carry books around. To cradle them. To imagine giving them away and then to pull them back, greedy, eyes wide, full of hope.

These are magic treasure chests with the quality of clown cars or those tents in cartoons: they look impossibly small, simple, as if they are nothing. Inside are worlds, riches, an enormous number of clowns.

I brought too many. I will likely never read the one I’ve carried around for more than twenty years. Although as I type that, I don’t believe myself. I think it would be wonderful to read it, that it will open up something for me that I cannot be without. My name is Elizabeth; I am addicted to books.

Angie and I are legally married (in some parts) and have two children together, but the biggest commitment we ever made to each other was combining libraries. Some things are impossible to undo . . .

And this love of books is the reason why–despite the vagaries of the market, the changing form of the page (electronic! more clowns in a smaller car!), the overwhelming number of books being published every year, impossible to keep up with–I am so thrilled with each writer, with each enchanted book. With yours. With mine. With the ones I find when I wander the bookstores and libraries, when I peruse the shelves of friends.

There are amazing sunsets, laughing children, the feeling of a cool river on a hot day, but let us not forget, as we rub our aching backs and settle another box too precariously atop the last, to raise our glasses to that glorious paen to the best of civilization and humanity: the book.