5/13/2002 7:42 PM
De gustibus non disputandum est?
Chaque a son gout?

I have been cleaning the basement. The basement is where I live, cohabiting the space with about ten thousand books, that tumble in waves over the shelves that I have built like water overfills a trough and falls to the land below. In this particular case, the cracked concrete floor.

I have heard various people give various opinions about the number of books that I have collected over the years, keep in mind that this is by no means my first collection, I have changed city and residence several times. With each move I turned over (sold, packed in boxes and given to Goodwill) mountains of poetry, instruction, popular genre, music, language, philosophy, science, philosophy of science, science of philosophy, Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian, even the occasional Skinnerian, from pre Soaks to Sri Folks. I probably don’t have an original volume from an original collection anywhere.

The various opinions are often attacks. I don’t understand it! Did you read all those books, they say? Course not. Look, do the math. If I have say 10,000 books, entirely in the realm of possibility, lining the shelves, stacked on the floor, climbing up the steps, sneaking out the door, how long would it take to read them. Okay, if I read a book a day, which I do not, although I have on occasion read, two or three books in a day (and some grand days those were) I would read 365 books a year, right. So in three years, I would read, and let’s just round off for easy math (I could run this through Excel or MathCad and come up with 365 times 3 = 1,095 and 10,000 divided by 1,095 = 9.132420091 but that .133430091 (roughly 48 days in a normal year) of a year would just depress me, especially considering that I haven’t taken the two years that would encompass the leap of February 29) one thousand books. In a further effort to keep easy math, in three years I would read one thousand books, gives me some time to eat, sleep and watch a movie, have a conversation. Hence it would take me 30 years to read 10,000 books if I read about a book a day. I ask you? Have I read all these books?

So, I either answer, yes, every word or Do I look like the kind of person who would keep around books that I have already read? Or (somewhat more flawed and cryptically) Do you keep all the bottles of beer that you drink? Often my dumb yet blank stare answers a whole world of query.

I have been told that books: are my security blanket, that I love books more than I love people, or just plain that I am an idiot, this mostly from people who buy George Carlin’s tirade about all the stuff we accumulate, or would be Guru Gautamas that believe in a simple, bare, Shaker kind of meaningful existence. (There are, I think, only two or three Shakers left because their rigorous belief in celibacy has willed them out of existence, conversion, in this case, did not bring about a long line of being.)

It’s really a little more complex and a little more simple than all that. Books are my passion. I do thrill at them as objects, they can be pretty or gross or weighty or flighty. I do believe that you can judge a book by its cover. What the hell else do you have to judge it by? Contents? I only have 10,000 books in my house, how many are in the book stores, where we sip coffee and lounge in comfortable stuffed chairs or at the top of the concrete steps of the local library? How can you choose what to read? How can you judge what will move you or enlighten you?

Personally I have always preferred heft and smell to cover art, but it is all one and the same. I don’t want to go all mystical and goo goo eyed on you, but I do believe that some synchronistic relationship in the universe, that works with my five sense in synesthesia brings me to my choices in reading. Something integral works here for me. Like a hunter in touch with the forest around and abound, alive to all the sub and super sensual, who finds, with no direct knowledge the correct path.

I can also find missing things. It is easy really. You must look where they are. I can’t really say it any better than that although I admit it is an inelegant tautology. There you have it. What I need to read, the way in which I must amplify my intelligence, is placed in front of me, when I care to look, as surely as a bulls eye can draw an arrow to its center.

Now, let me see, if an average book has three hundred and fifty pages and each page has four hundred and thirty five words comprised of five letters then…Okay. The book that I will produce, that I have been working on for at least a millennium is the Book of Answers. It’s format will be like this:

Chapter 1 (pg 5-15)

Ex. 1 (a) Botulism
(c) Carborundum
(e) Haile Sellassie

Ex. 3 Abba dabba dabba said the Chippie to the Monk

And so on until all the answers are given.