biblioteke

This blog emerges from the dark and dusty crevices between forty-eight cardboard boxes piled floor to ceiling in what would be the dining area of my two bedroom condominium in Foster City, California; a temporary place populated by towers of boxes filled with hundreds of volumes of poetry, novels, short stories, plays and various miscellany.

In short, my library.

This collection of boxes I refer to as my library began its journey twenty years ago when, moved by a novel I read during from my sophomore high school English class, I decided to commence my own collection of books.

Twenty five years later, across two decades of sleepy afternoons reading on trains, huddled inside air-conditioned libraries and student lounges, lying half-asleep on soft fields of grass, hidden beneath the extended frond of a Palm tree on a deserted beach in Baja Mexico, or strewn atop the various un-made beds I’ve inhabited over the years, my library has grown beside me to become an entity unto itself, a presence with substantial heft, and presently, a re-formulated community of cardboard liquor-boxes, a temporary shanty-town which now commanded a lion’s portion of my personal living space.

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I had not seen these books in two years. I had not set eyes upon them or touched their pages other than their cardboard bulk which I dodged to escape to my office of employment each morning as the sun rose. Returning home, late in the evening, I circumvented these same cardboard skyscrapers inside my dining room when the streets were empty and the books disappeared into the invisible black of my condominium.

I did not look at my library.

I felt ashamed and embarrassed by what those books represented to me. Most of them, I believed, would be painful to revisit.

Eventually I forgot my library was there, as if it were normal to live with forty-eight cardboard boxes blocking the archway to one’s kitchen, to live beside an entity that smelled of something salty and stale, an immovable neighbor whose circumference took up the entire square footage of an entirely unwanted room.

As if I were going to give dinner parties ever again.

Two years ago, my wife and I separated. The parameters of my life became very clear to me. I had no choice but to start at the beginning, again. I had to find a place to live, to sleep, to eat and to bathe. A year ago, the divorce became final. As strange as it may sound to hear from a person who comes from an academic background and a history of solid employment, I had no idea how to live.

My only possessions were my wardrobe and my library.

Since my divorce, I have lived here in Foster City in a type of “user-friendly” coma. I don’t remember much of the past two years. Like, for example, I have no clear recollection the day I moved here specifically. I remember the moving truck, but I’m missing long passages of how I carried my suitcase inside or when I discovered where to do my laundry.

I worked days as a tech writer for an Internet company in Silicon Valley. The circumstances of my life were blurry to me. I felt barely alive. The last thing I could imagine was reading a book.

So my library became my silent roommate, the visible elephant in my own invisible, blurry world.

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Then, two weeks ago, I woke up for no reason, just as the sun was rising.

As I navigated my way to the kitchen for a cup of coffee, my library of cardboard boxes came into focus inside the morning yellow light.

I wondered what all the boxes were doing in my dining room. It was like the UPS man arrived in the middle of the night and made a surprise delivery. Did those books belong to me? Did someone leave these boxes here by mistake?

Consciously, I knew this was not the case, but my first reaction was of non-recognition, like walking past a mirror and barely catching one’s reflection out of the corner of one’s eye. It was true; sometimes the last person you recognized in the world was yourself.

Eventually I accepted the fact those books, my library, was still beside me, within my life and part of me — whatever became of me. I realized my initial shock of seeing my library meant somehow I was coming up for air; perhaps a small stem of me had not died when my marriage failed. Perhaps those books were the first sign of me learning to think again and, perhaps, to use what remained of my brain.

There had to be a reason why I ended up alone with my library as my only companion.

For that reason my collection of books mesmerizes me, surprises me and at times frightens me because I do not believe coincidence lead me to haul these books from coast to coast, from job to job, apartment to apartment, and yet remain in my possession here to the bitter end in Foster City, California. I don’t believe that this collection of books is without purpose or consequence.

Since that sunrise morning I can’t get my books off my mind. My library is now the focus of my life. My boxes fill me with questions and feelings about the nature of my collection, the importance of reading in my life, and the unsolvable puzzle of what exactly a library in one’s life means.

I don’t really live alone, I realized, the morning I found my collection of books in my dining room.

Somewhere deep inside those boxes, I feel certain, far within what I call a body of evidence, a record of my reading-life up until now, lay the answer to how to get myself out of this condominium in Foster City, California, to discover once again what kind of person I was and who I could become.

The picture on the blog is an image of the library in ancient Alexandria. The French artist, David Boullee, drew a sketch of how he imagined the infamous library.

People have been dreaming about libraries for centuries.

The same is happening with me.

Does it matter whether a library lives in the imagination or whether it is real? Is a library a fantasy of youthful arrogance or the mark of accumulated wisdom?

Lately I have gathered the will to open a random cardboard box and retrieve an anonymous book. I have decided to reintroduce myself to my library, book by book. This blog is not so much a catalogue of my findings but a record of my journey back through my biblioteke, the residue of my old life, those bits of discovery from times-past, unearthed within the world where I live and, presently, read.