Books

About a month ago, the Times published a long article about a woman who has spent the past 30 years or so developing her garden. But now that she's reached her early seventies, she's decided to simplify her gardening tasks. She's replacing annuals with perennials and substituting plants that require little maintenance for plants, such as roses, that demand more attention. Her husband, however, finds it hard to throw anything away. Without telling her, he sometimes takes the discarded plants and repositions them in another part of the garden. "Husbands are all very well," she said, "but a husband in the garden is a mixed blessing."

This couple represents my warring impulses with respect not to plants but to books. On the one hand, I remember with pleasure those sabbaticals at UCLA when we lived in furnished apartments. These were well furnished, with ample linens, tableware, cooking implements, and the like, and we needed to buy nothing to begin housekeeping. I liked the austere, uncluttered atmosphere of those apartments, which contained no books other than those we had brought with us. But each time we spent any time in Los Angeles, we'd accumulate a dozen or so books, few of them really necessary, yet at the end of our stay we'd ship them all home.

While I like living among minimal possessions, including books, once the books are in my home, I find it hard to give them away. The few hundred that we've accumulated during the past ten years while living in this apartment - most of that time on a part-time basis - will be swamped by the fifteen hundred to two thousand books we shipped from Jerusalem and are now sitting in a Bronx warehouse. We're now adding bookshelves to accommodate them. When we finally arrange them on our shelves, they'll provide, at least for me, an illusion of solidity and security, a kind of anchoring, the literary equivalent of a security blanket. They'll be a reassuring presence.

It's nonsense, I know. We don't need them. We live one block from the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, and we can glean a wealth of information just from the internet. I'm not going to reread or even refer to most of the books from Jerusalem. Still, how can I throw them out or give them away? Each one is a friend, a witness to part of my history. I'd feel as if I were abandoning them, which of course is absurd.

Still, we should be simplifying our life, just as that gardener is trying to do, not complicating it, as will be the case when the books finally arrive at our door. By that time we will have lived without them for almost three years. Maybe by then we won't mind going through them and drastically thinning them out. But since books tend to expand to fill the available space, and since past behavior is the best single predictor of future behavior, it's not likely that we'll get very far. But if we fail to thin them out, we can at least prevent their further expansion. To this end, I plan to distribute condoms among the bookshelves.