Pruning

As I try to shelve my books here in our 120-year old cottage, with its sloping wooden floors and lack of storage, I discover that I still have way too many books for the available space.  It's time once again to prune back the overabundance of reading material that still remains from previous thinning. I did some serious pruning in 2007, when my family and I moved from Texas to Georgia, then again before packing up for another move to Louisiana, and now, soon after, another attempt to corral my books to fit the available space.

It's a difficult task, for even the books that I know I will probably never read again provide a service for me: they remind me of the different interests I cultivated during certain times of my life--hence the volumes of Walker Percy non-fiction. Some remind me of particular people, for there are inscriptions inside that reveal relationships, expectations, promises. On the inside cover of a slim volume of Nikki Giovanni's poems--Happy birthday, Anita. I love you. Always, Marie, written by a once-close college friend from whom I am now separated by years of sporadic--and then failing-- communication. On the inside cover of Michael Shaara's novel of the civil war, Killer Angels, a student from my first years of teaching at Louisiana State University thanks me for providing him with a better insight into reading. He tells me that he enjoyed the class very much. How unappreciative I am in not having yet read this novel. I'm putting it on my bedside table right now. (I've done this before, but because this yellowing paperback novel has survived several "thinnings," it seems that I continue to believe that someday I will follow through with my resolution.)

Then there are the necessary kind words of the poetry workshop leader. To Anita, Margaret Gibson salutes me on the title page of Earth Elegy: New and Selected Poems; with warm wishes and respect for your work. On the title page of Recovered Body, my poems go from achieving "respect" to "beauty." For Anita, Scott Cairns has written, well-met at the Glen. Here's wishing you the best as you continue with your beautiful poems. Barbara Crooker's volume of poetry, Radiance, reminds me of a workshop I had attended the year previous to the date of this note: For Anita, In the pleasure of your company (missed you this year) & in the great pleasure of your work. Well, I must keep these books to cheer me in the dark hours of the night when the muse is MIA, and I am afraid I'll never write another poem again.

Other books recall the ghosts of emotions I felt when I first read them, like the recollection of passion long past spent. This morning as I was sitting in the old recliner in my study, looking at the piles of books on the floor, I spied the tattered cover of John Graves' narrative of his canoe trip down the Brazos River in Texas, Goodbye to a River. For a fleeting moment, I was in my mid-twenties once again, newly aroused to the fecundity of meaning in the natural world that a poet could delve and develop. That much younger me bracketed the first sentences of chapter seven with these words: read in English 103 class. I suspect I was teaching descriptive writing to English freshmen at Texas A&M University at the time and thought of using Graves' words to coax my students toward specificity. And an asterisk beside the following words suggest that I identified with the author's sentiments:

Origin being as it is an accident outside the scope of one's will, I tend not to seek much credit for being a Texan. Often (breathes there a man/) I can work up some proud warmth about the fact that I indubitably am one. A lot of the time, though, I'd as soon be forty other kinds of men I've known....If a man couldn't escape what he came from, we would most of us still be peasants in Old World hovels. But, if, having escaped or not, he wants in some way to know himself, define himself, and tries to do it without taking into account the thing he came from, he is writing without any ink in his pen. The provincial who cultivates only his roots is in peril, potato-like, of becoming more root than plant. The man who cuts his roots away and denies that they were ever connected with him withers into half a man.

In these books I see the roots of what I once was, the evidence of how and why I have become who I am. To subvert a line from Tennyson, "I am a part of all that I have read." But there is just not enough room in this house for all our stuff and the stuff we've been dragging around from previous generations of my husband's family. Time again to prune. Maybe someday soon I'll get the courage to do the same with my journals and letters--only instead of pruning, I'll build a bonfire to my vanity.