The proper display of certain items

Dear diary,

What IS there to DO anymore? They say Cinderella went to a ball. She wore a gown and slippers, and she stayed out past midnight. When’s the last time any modern manikin went to a ball? Do they even have balls anymore? Also: Why can’t I work in the coal mines, just for the experience of it—just to know what it’s like to be down there in the dark, sweating and laboring? They won’t let me do it just for a day or two, for fun; no, I’m only allowed to mine coal if I commit to a contract for long-term employment. That makes me angry. You should be able to try anything, any activity or lifestyle, at least a couple times, so that you can know WHY you opted out of being, say, a ballerina or a kamikaze pilot. My own tribe does not treat curious newcomers with disdain: If you show up at our front door asking to work as a prophet, just for today (Sunday, June 24) I’ll tell you: Sure! Have at it! It’s easy! You’ll love it! Moreover, you don’t even need to sign any legal documents—I don’t own the intellectual property rights to prophesying; anyone with a tongue and a voice can act as a prophet. Or even if you lack the ability to speak, you can simply behave in a strange way (wholly non-verbally): that will suffice to capture the nation’s attention. It’s like making a citizen’s arrest: one needn’t be a sworn law-enforcement official or have possession of a court-ordered warrant to pin down an innocent; likewise, any regular person can broadcast prophecies. And the moment you wish to quit, you can shuffle back to your cubicle on the computer farm—nobody’s stopping you. In truth, the prophetic class doesn’t even want more members. It doesn’t care if it survives into the next age or not. It knows it’s a nuisance.

(That initial paragraph was just to get rid of all the people who don’t really want to be here anyway and are only reading this entry because it was assigned to them in school. Now I will tell all my personal secrets to the loyal remainder.)

Well, I had to pack up a lot of my books last night. Box ’em up. We’re trying to unclutter the apartment, so that it can be “staged”: our realtor wants to send a professional photographer over to take pictures. It’s like our home is a prostitute with a website that needs clickable images, and it must show the right amount of its decor, and pose hotly, and grimace; and the picture must be strategically lit and framed in a way to arouse the desire of the spectator. It wants you to want it. Anyway, she (the real estate agent) said that I have way too many books. Nobody visits a house-porn site for its literature. Folks crave white walls, neutral floors, earth-toned counters, granite sinks with brushed nickel faucets, and shelves without books. Everything beige. So I was told to reduce my home’s book-fat to seventy-five percent. I have three tall bookcases and one small one, in the front room; and there are three more tall ones in the other room. And they’re all messily bursting with books, overflowing. The realtor’s exact words were: “Bookcases are fine, but not so many: You can keep one tall and one short one; get rid of the rest; and it’s OK to keep books on the shelves, but only fill them about three-quarters full – anything beyond that ratio is perverse.” So I did NOT spend my Saturday night partying at a private nightclub with my paralegal cronies BUT RATHER banning books from my personal library.

It’s not really sad to note each volume’s title as you place it into its coffin (that’s how I think of the cardboard boxes that I’m packaging the surplus books into, for storage until we relocate)—I’m not sentimental about possessions; my eyes are only watering because my allergies are acting up. But it is dismaying to note how sublime the world of imaginative literature is, compared to the stifling wasteland of commerce – because we could, as a culture, choose to revel in the bliss of the former, yet we allow the latter to gray us out day by day.

In order to make the above task bearable, I told myself: You are an ancient priest whose country is being enslaved by invaders; you have only this night to save the most holy scriptures out of the temple, and there’s a severely limited amount of space in the ark: so choose wisely!

My main concern, speaking as a modern prophet trapped between capitalism and e-tech (electronic technology), is that whatever texts I save must needs sustain me thru the duration of this disaster—whether it’s a flood, an alien takeover, a worldwide firestorm, or just a change in living quarters—the fifty books that fit inside my ark are all that I’ll get to read for a while; so they better be good. While selecting them, I learned something about my own taste. For you can pay lip service to novel X or poet Y when conversing with surrealists at the café; however, when life presents you “The Tunnel” section of The Bridge, if you don’t end up preserving those oft-lauded works, then you might as well join the 21st-century Christians, cuz your heart ain’t in it.

I intended to jot down a list here of my keepers (I mean the books that I granted salvation), but then it hit me: Nobody cares. —But now I’ll make a list anyway, because I don’t care that nobody cares. Plus this is a note-to-self, so see your way out of it, if you don’t like being me.

Furthermore, if the hour arrives when I unpack the dead from their graves, I’m liable to forget which souls circumvented condemnation, once the ever-living intermix with the resurrected. That’s another reason to etch this historical record.

So of course I have Shakespeare as walking one side of me, and the King James Bible close-walking the other side of me, and Whitman in the middle as with companions… and Dante’s Divine Comedy, The Iliad and The Odyssey… These were all expected, right?—it’s almost boring to mention; one wants to blurt: “just read them, or shut up about it.” (A text is shunned by its age for being unprecedented – in money terms: unmarketable – so it struggles to attain the heights; and yet, once there, if its place is too sturdily won, it’s soon hated alike for being super-canonical.) So although, yeah, Don Quixote, Montaigne, Moby-Dick, Lewis Carroll, and all the usual suspects are there, the less-familiar might seem more intriguing, so I’ll favor them only for lack of scroll estate…

But now that I look over my treasure, I realize that I kept nothing but what you’d expect from me… The Complete Edward Lear… Anne Carson’s Decreation… The Collected Oscar Wilde… Hesiod… Longinus… Aristophanes… Coleridge’s poems and prose (Biographia Literaria)… Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian… The Blackmores’ translation of the Selected Poems of Victor Hugo… Both parts of Goethe’s Faust… Huckleberry Finn… Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon… Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons… The complete poems of Emily Dickinson… Franz Kafka’s Complete Stories… Emerson: absolutely everything… Beckett’s Three Novels… John Ashbery: Collected Poems 1991-2000… Walter Pater’s The Renaissance… James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover… Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller… Two from Nietzsche: Beyond Good & Evil and a volume that contains both On the Genealogy of Morals (my favorite) and Ecce Homo… Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time… The complete poems of Andrew Marvell…

And last plus least I saved all my own masterpieces and positioned them alongside the Bible and Whitman and Shakespeare, right at the center of the upper-mid shelf, at eye-level, as the focal point; cuz I want all prospective homebuyers who are allured by the tastefully balanced appearance of our bookcase to venture a closer look at its contents and grow discomfited.