Long Life

And my Many Books

I buy more books that I may live longer

The logic is this: I am too cheap to buy something and then not use it. You know, just to “have” it (like cookbooks). Recast in literary terms: I’m too cheap to buy a book and then not read it.

Unthinkable.

Unpardonable.

AKA: I would never die with books unread. So, if I’d ever get within spitting distance of finishing all my books, I’d add more, in a hurry.

That, however, is an event I don’t fear — running out of books, I mean.

Because: I have about two hundred analog (as in paper) books, and some run close a thousand pages. The many, if not the majority of these are unread as of yet.

Because: over the years I have bought over a thousand Kindle books, the majority of which I have not read yet. For sake of both simplicity and orderliness, I keep only 450 of these books on my Kindle, the rest, seven some hundred plus, remain in the Kindle cloud library.

That said, I do read if not constantly, then next door to it. These days I read mostly books on Buddhism (especially Zen) and philosophy. Yes, a few works of fiction, too — right now I’m reading Nadeem Aslam’s “The Golden Legend” (a book I had been saving for a windy day — those are the days when the outside is less than welcoming in my town — and just now finally dusted it off, digitally speaking, and began to read).

One reviewer described some of Aslam’s writing as “achingly beautiful” and I feel that this is about as well put as you can get in English. The man is truly a word wizard, wielding sheer beauty to describe some of the darkest ugliness in the world: the agonizingly perverted fundamentalist view of radical Islam, the sick thirst for the Infidel’s blood that runs through a severely myopic generation. Aslam knows this, he has seen, and the tells, in, yes, achingly beautiful langauge.

Recently, I’ve also begun to read Hannah Arendt’s “The Life of the Mind”, an amazing exploration of human thought. I wish she were still alive so I could write and thank her for his incredible work.

I am also, in snippets, savoring Lucy Ellmann’s “Ducks, Newburyport”, a book-length sentence (running to a thousand pages) virtually impossible to describe. The only thing I can do or say is to imitate the Buddha: to point at the book and say read it. Anything I say about it is not the book, it has to be experienced, personally.

Currently, I am also reding David Loy’s “Nonduality: In Buddhism and Beyond”, a book from all angles and in all aspects as brilliant as Arendt’s. One reads both Arendt and Loy slowly, with a dictionary close at hand, or on your Kindle, for if you don’t get what she or he says, it’s not the writer but the reader who is muddled and there is more than likely some word or other that they use in a way that you have yet to define. Chasing down the correct definition is always, always worth the effort.

As for the other 446 books, along with the 700+ in the cloud: the truth is that if I sat down with a mountain of amphetamines by my side and read day and night from now on, I’d be well over a hundred before I reached the end. Add to that the more realistic scenario of also having to sleep and eat and so on, well, you do the math.

Point is, I don’t have to buy more books to live longer — I’m guaranteed about one hundred and fifty as it is.

Still I buy them, just to make sure.

All of the above just said, I do enjoy just “having” books as well, both read and unread; probably more than just about anything else in the world. That, however, would be the topic of a different musing.

P.S. If you like what you’ve read here and would like to contribute to the creative motion, as it were, you can do so via PayPal: here.

© Wolfstuff