I hate it when my local US Postal Service worker lets me know that I'm ruining her day.
That wasn't what I'd intended. I was only trying to cut our moving costs by mailing some books ahead of us. The problem is, as every nomadic academic knows, that books are really, really heavy. The five boxes I lugged to the post office this morning probably weighed about two hundred pounds. While I was setting them on the counter, the postal employee who was serving me--who, incidentally, probably weighed less than any single one of these boxes--kept giving me that look that says, if you break my scale, I'll break your spine.
Still, I can't complain. That's five boxes we don't have to worry about now. Only about two hundred more to go.
One good thing about this move is that it's inducing in me a kind of paradigm shift--or a sea change, perhaps--in my book retention habits. I am, it must be said, a packrat when it comes to books. Pick any given book, and I can give you a reason why I really ought to hang onto it. I'm planning to go back and write that article about early 20th century detective fiction, after all. Granted, that travel guide to Central Asia is a bit out of date, but it's got a lot of nice maps in it, and we really might get over there one of these days. You get the idea.
But now that there's a price tag stuck on every pound of books, I'm finding myself able to get a bit more critical distance from these papery companions. Am I so sure that I'm going to write an essay on Ross Macdonald that I need to spend fifteen bucks to ship seven dollars' worth of his novels to our new home? Maybe not. And how likely am I to make it to Kazakhstan in the next couple of years? Not bloody likely, that's how likely. Those back issues of
Granta? Um, maybe I can leave them, too.
The larger the stack of books that I'm not taking grows, the easier it is to add to it. It's liberating.
