Have you heard that joke about Hegel and negation?
Cleaning out and re-arranging my massive and constantly growing book collection after the end of a stressful semester has now become a custom, a tradition that I often look forward to. Its a few days of being surrounded and swarmed by scores of bounded pages, and I like to take my time opening and perusing through each title as a place it back to its place in the shelf. I undertake this activity in the quiet of the night, without music or podcasts playing in the background. The physical labour that goes into sorting, and re-arranging heavy tomes keeps me engaged throughout. Most importantly the company of books, and the quiet of the night allows for peaceful introspection. During the exercise, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of books that had remained completely untouched, some for more than a decade! Their spines had not cracked yet and the smell of the bookstore that I bought it from still lingered.
I have always given into my impulse of ‘owning’ things. In that way, I am a materialist in denial, because even though I am obsessed with ‘ownership’ I always tend to downplay my obsession and attachment with ‘things’. Nonetheless, I remain a materialist and by closing my eyes to it, it wont unfortunately fade away. My library ritual this year made me self-aware of this ‘collector’ habit. I was always obsessed with the appearance of knowledge, as against knowledge itself. I am happy to pose as a bookworm who reads extensively when in fact I have only read (cover-to-cover) a measly 5% of the total strength of my library. I always believed in the ‘buy-now read-later’ policy, because I was convinced that eventually one day I would end up reading it, allowing me to rationalise an indiscriminate spree of book buying that has unfortunately lasted 20 years. Most of all, it is the ‘imposter syndrome’, of posing as a pseudo-intellectual that scares me most and fuels me to finish and repay my book debt .
The time is now. The days of deferring the actual hard task of reading are now behind me and I have solemnly resolve to put a complete ban on spending money on books indefinitely, i.e till I finish reading cover-to-cover every book that I currently own. My current timeline is arbitrarily set at a 1000 days from now. I will use my books page to maintain track of my progress. I intend to not only read these books, but as far as practicable also put up notes and quotes on the blog as and when possible.
Signing Off.
–
krsna.