What We Leave Behind
I’m reading Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell about his bookshop in Scotland. I picked it up because it was on sale (and not in our library system) and didn’t know a lot about it. But I’m absolutely smitten by it and have marked three passages so far.
The first came early on in the book––page 31––when he went to clear the estate of a childless/childfree couple and pick up their books for resale in his shop. He explains,
The experience of clearing a deceased estate is one familiar to most people in the second-hand book trade and it is one to which you slowly become desensitised, except in situations like this, in which the dead couple is childless. For some reason the photographs on the wall – the husband in his smart RAF uniform, the wife as a young woman visiting Paris – evoke a kind of melancholy that is not there in deals where couples are survived by their children. Dismantling such a book collection seems to be the ultimate act of destruction of their character – you are responsible for erasing the last piece of evidence of who they were. This woman’s book collection was a record of her character: her interests, as close as anything she left to some kind of genetic inheritance. Perhaps that’s why her nephew waited so long before asking us to look at the books.
I sat with that passage for a long time. It was written by someone who––as far as I know––doesn’t have children, and his experience, perhaps, has informed his beliefs. But I had a hard time tying it to parenthood. Dismantling any person’s book collection is about releasing their character, and hopefully all of us are more than just our book collections.
Meaning, that concept of the ways we announce to the world “This is who I am” happens through our possessions, even when there are children, AND our possessions or children are not the only statement we leave behind.
Moreover, the children we raise aren’t the only carriers of our story. My former students, for example, carry part of my story. And that story of who I am and what matters to me (they would all tell you the French Revolution; it was the one unit where I cried every year, without fail) is no less important than the story that the twins know.
Unless you never leave your home or interact with other people, that evidence continues to exist, whether we like it or not.
What are your thoughts?
3 comments
I think it’s more along the lines of…if there are close family members, they might take the most meaningful of the books that the person leaves behind. And the rest are…discards? I don’t know. My aunt had a lot of books, and I requested some of them that I remembered from my childhood. My favorite is Charles Addams’ take on Mother Goose – the undercurrent of evil in nursery rhymes was so hilariously enhanced with the addition of Wednesday, Pugsley, et al. I don’t remember who got the Madeline books we all had memorized. For some reason, I got a lot of the art books too – my aunt was a painter, and my cousin the artist didn’t have room for all kinds of stuff, so I guess it fell to the next most creative person (as perceived by…my other aunts? I don’t even know how I ended up with the stuff). I also got cookbooks – I guess it pays to impress your aunts with your cooking skillz when they come to check out your first condo!
Whew! That was quite a tangent!
Anyway, when there’s no one to take the meaningful stuff, it seems sad. But that’s just a skewed idea from a short-sighted individual who makes assumptions. He has no idea whether people have already shared things or cut down a collection before he comes along – and sometimes heirs don’t either. But people are conditioned to view the childless/childfree with pity, which is just dumb.
If I die tomorrow, people will be confused by my book collection. Some of it is actually mine, but a lot of it consists of random acquisitions from other people. My daughter will wonder whether she should get rid of the set of classics that my grandfather bought for my mom and her sisters. And she’s only ever seen me read books from the library – I could get rid of the boxes I have in the basement and not miss any of the books. My personality is not in there, really.
Ooh. I want to read this book now.
I both agree and disagree – with you, and with him. I am torn whether to respond here or on my blog. Maybe on my blog, because you don’t want a lengthy post as a comment! So I’m going to take a slightly different angle – now that my book collection from the last ten years is largely in my Amazon account and my library e-book records (and they’re not even mine, they are my husband’s), there’s not even going to be a book collection left when I go.
the thought of hone day aving to go through my parents book collections is daunting. but the one thing I know is that I have to pick up every book separately, because they are the kind of people to stick some money in a book for a rainy day. Or a flower to dry….