As one chapter ends, a new one begins

Goodbye old friends. Once we were close, but the truth is we haven’t been in touch for years. It’s time. Goodbye. Into the boot you go, no complaining, and down to the op shop we quietly travel. You’ll be handled with affection there, perhaps not love, but others will show you interest that I, it must be said, haven’t shown you for a long time.

Are the bookshelves there to impress visitors? There’s a bit of that but it’s also an affirmation of who you are, and a bookmark of a time in your life.Credit: Brooke Holm

And so we went. The books were welcomed with open arms, which was handy. There were a lot of them. Into a back room they went for sorting. I didn’t shed a tear. Indeed, I felt nothing. Possibly relief that they had gone to a good home, and from there to another if bought.

The op shop woman was taken aback at how many there were but still took them in, with a smile, which emboldened me to ask could I deliver perhaps two or three more bootfulls? She paused, probably thinking who is this book thief, or perhaps poor man he has a terminal illness, but she smiled and said yes, of course. I thanked her and thought briefly of joking that it was because I was entering a new chapter in my life, but held back. Just culling the bookshelves, I said.

But really it’s more like downsizing the library of my life. It’s time. Of course, the walls of home and studio have not been covered with every book I’ve bought over the years but equally I’ve never been one to throw much out. I even mailed back to Australia books I had bought when I was living in Ireland (How could I part with Dingle Down the Years?) Before work allowed me to spend money on books and records, in the green years of primary and early high school, there was the public library. You read the books, you gave them back. There was a time limit.

But private is different. Private is for as long as you want. What you read proclaims an essence of who you are. Are the bookshelves there to impress visitors? There’s a bit of that but it’s also an affirmation of who you are, and a bookmark of a time in your life. They’re time machines in a way. After all, you can’t possibly talk to all these writers. That’s just silly. But they can talk to you. I wonder what Hazlitt has to say today or Hitchens or Zappa? Whisper, shout, laugh and cry with you, they will.

Now in the world of vast private libraries, I am the tiniest smudge in the margin. It’s been reported Karl Lagerfeld had a library of 300,000 books, George Lucas 27,000 and Thomas Jefferson more than 6000, to randomly pluck collectors off the shelf. I’ve never counted mine but there’d be hundreds. Jefferson said he couldn’t live without books, which may be true spiritually but surely not physiologically. You may devour a tome, give yourself a little iron in the soul, but surely one cannot eat words. So I decided I could live without Hemingway, but not Steinbeck. Out went Thomas Hobbes and in stayed Calvin and Hobbes. As one chapter ended, another begins.

Warwick McFadyen is a Melbourne writer.