Last night, despite a perfectly lovely day without so much caffeine, I found myself at 2 a.m. unable to sleep. I think I passed the optimal sleep window about an hour beforehand. Walking and Talking was on IFC, and I totally got hooked into it.
But I think the real thing was, I spent a couple of hours earlier in the evening cleaning up and reorganizing my study. That room has a tendency to be the catch-all for when we, say, have a party and we've got to get all the stuff out of the front room and the kitchen. Where will it go? On the floor of my study, that's where. Add that to the fact that I'm an acquisitive fiend, an over-ambitious inventor of projects, and, in general, kind of a slob, and you have the wreck that was my study.
In particular, I decided to rearrange my books. Who knows why, for instance, I had two sets of fiction in two widely separated locations on my shelves? And how exactly did I acquire so much poetry? I weeded out a lot of stuff, rearranged so that the collections (pretentious word, but I'm sticking by it) are now each in a single spot, alphabetized . . . Anyhow, I only got through the poetry, the fiction, and the criticism/theory before other activities took over. So at 2 a.m., I got up and finished the job.
Now, I have to face the rest of the room. I'm hoping not to have to face another spate of insomnia to get through it--rather, that the force of my sterling character will spur me to marshal my resources, gird up my loins, fresh courage take (that's the Mormon in me talking), etc. Clean study, clean mind. Or something like that.
The questions is, have you combined book "collections" in your household? This is really more of a committment than marriage itself. Dr. Write and Middlebrow are halfway there, but, frankly, I still have book committment issues--which is to say that I'm committed to the idea that certain books in the house are mine.
ReplyDeleteAt least you have insomnia to blame. Middlebrow likes to rearrange the books for no apparent reason. Or he has a reason, but no one else can quite perceive it. Or he's decided to sell some books, only to experience seller's remorse when, a year later, he remembers he needed that book to write his dissertation. I, too, have book collection mixing issues. The fiction, for example, is mine. Plus I have my poetry books, which are way more contemporary than Middlebrow's, which stops somewhere around Williams.
ReplyDeleteMan, I just got some serious insight into your marriage! All good, of course.
ReplyDeleteAnne Fadiman in Ex Libris writes about issues mixing book collections. She knew she was finally married when things got mixed. It took ten years or something like that.
ReplyDeleteI seriously need to sort through my books at home. I spend far too much time looking for one particular book.