[Smashy the Hammer] [An Aspiring Luddite]
I carry no phone
An aspiring Luddite
In a wired world.
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[Jeff Berry]
Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he migrated to the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

Books on a Shelf
9 May 2012
[A Book Shelf]

People leave traces of their lives in sometimes obscure places, in places where one might not expect to find them; sometimes, even, they leave them in places where it requires one to look at things in a particular, perhaps even peculiar way. Like a hologram, a series of strange lines, when viewed askance, can take on a certain shape.

We've lived in the same building for seventeen years now. In the basement are a pair of rickety metal shelves which serve as a sort of community library, or, more accurately, a book exchange. People can drop off books, for whatever reason one might be driven to divest one's self of books, or pick up the books which have been so dropped. The life-cycle of the building can, in part, be traced in the ebb and flow of the books on the shelves.

Who was it who decided they no longer needed the three or four books with titles like, "How to Get Pregnant?" Should they receive felicitations or condolences? In a few years will we see a spate of no-longer-needed books with titles like, "Dealing with the Terrible Twos?"

Are the side-by-side biographies of Keith Richards and David Bowie indicative of a change in musical taste, or some deeper disillusionment with the lifestyles of the rich and famous?

What child suddenly outgrew a whole set of "Angelina Ballerina" books? And why is there book two of the Lloyd Alexander "Black Cauldron" series, but neither book one nor books three through five?

Does a sudden onslaught of Nineteenth century philosophy mean that someone just finished a class or a degree? Or changed majors? Or changed schools and majors and didn't want to ship them? Does it perhaps indicate instead such a deep love of the text that the owner upgraded to a hard-bound annotated edition and no longer needs an abridged Penguin Classic?

As one gets used to the rhythms of the book-shelves, one finds one's self anticipating certain things. That old man, the fixture for so many years, who died recently, leaving behind a son and daughter-in-law who live in the building, has left a gap in the life of the building. With a faint sense of dread, I await the Chinese books to begin appearing on the shelves, testimony to his life and the inexorable march of time.

On a lighter note, who is the fan of trashy, popular thrillers? They appear with some regularity, suggesting that someone is reading them and then casting them aside. Which seems appropriate. But who is casting aside Arturo Peréz-Reverte?

The tides of popular culture wash across those metal shores as well. After the Lord of the Rings movies came out, Tolkien made an appearance. A single, forlorn, copy of The DaVinci Code still remains. I expect to see the Hunger Games trilogy each time I descend to take down the garbage or do laundry.

These relics, almost archeological, are windows into the life of the building and those who live in it. Do they give a complete picture? Of course not. They are glimpses, seen dimly, at a remove. But at the same time, there is something so utterly human about these cast-off tales, something that encourages speculation, and those glimpses are part of something larger.

The stories we read, and the stories we no longer read, are a part of our own story, and that is what makes a dusty metal shelf in a basement so compelling.


© 2012 Jeff Berry
The Aspiring Luddite