The Cleaning Demon appeared this morning and tempted me with the idea that my squalid living space could be transformed into a proper, well-organized habitation.
Before you try taking away custody of my cats, let me assure you that my apartment is very clean, the floors white and gleaming. Someone comes in once a week to vacuum and scrub everything. My cats don’t like disarray: they disapproved of my sister who tossed laundry everywhere so they got rid of her by sending her to Singapore for a job. When she returned to Manila, they married her off.
The problem is not sanitation, but aesthetics. I seem to lack the Martha Stewart gene, so I never bothered to fix up my place. In lieu of furniture I have stacks of books. For years I slept on the couch — I only bought a bed when it occurred to me that my sleeping habits were bad for my back. My lifestyle may be described as Late Witness Protection Program: it is designed to reveal nothing about the resident’s personality other than her lack of interest in domesticity.
For me the ideal residence is a hotel suite. I get out every day, and when I return everything has been tidied up, there are fresh towels and linens, the kitty litter has been replaced, and the dirty dishes have vanished. When I get tired of the wallpaper and the view I simply pack up and move to another hotel. Any place that contains my cats, my notebooks, my Mac, some clothes and my books is automatically Home.
Of these basics the books occupy the most volume. If I hadn’t acquired so many books over the years I might’ve spent the funds on chairs, tables and lamps. However, given the price of books versus the price of home decor, they would’ve been ugly chairs, tables and lamps. At least my books are beautiful.
So when the Cleaning Demon pays its annual visit, the main problem is the books. There are eight bookshelves, all packed two layers deep with books, and there are more books lying flat on top of them. It’s unsightly, it’s a pain retrieving the books I need, and everything is coated with dust. When shelves are too full you can’t just wipe the tops of the books or pass a vacuum nozzle over them. You need to take the books out of their compartments and dust them one by one.
Some people organize their shelves according to Author, Category (Fiction, Biography, Physics, or Wizards, Vampires, Orphans, etc), Publisher (Penguin Books and NYRB Classics have distinctive formats so they look good in a row), Size, or in alphabetical order (Is Arturo Perez Reverte in the P’s or R’s? What about Ursula K. LeGuin?). I have no system, so my books go wherever there’s space available. Like many bibliophibians, I have a mental map of my library. If I need the Isaac Babel, I know it’s on the white shelf, third row from the top.
Recently disaster struck. My loyal cleaner took all the books out of the shelves to clean each one with a rag, but returned them in a different order. I no longer knew where everything was. The cleaner could not be faulted for thoroughness, but my mental map had been rendered obsolete.
During the Cleaning Demon’s visit I decided to do what I’d been planning for years but never got around to: I catalogued all my books.
In the process I weeded out the titles I could live without. These included review copies, books I had no intention of ever reading again, and books whose pages had turned brown while waiting for me to read them. Generally if a book has been sitting unread for 10 years there is a diminishing probability that it will ever be read. Of course there are exceptions. I mean you, Marcel Proust.
There’s always a public library somewhere that could use the books.
Some of the discards were presents from friends, with inscriptions. It’s not that my friends are no longer appreciated, but I need air.
The cataloguing took the better part of two days. An incredible amount of dust and grime clings to old books — apparently wiping them with a rag only disperses the particles, which re-form when you’re not looking. After washing my hands for the fifth time it occurred to me to wear rubber gloves. I couldn’t find any, so I put plastic bags over my hands.
When performing triage on a library — choosing what to keep and what to dispose of — one must be ruthless. One must stick to the objective: to clear as much space as possible. There is no room for sentimentality.
You can’t keep a book just because you happened to be reading it when you met that adorable guy whose name you’ve forgotten. No, you must be strong, like the battlefield surgeons who invented the concept of triage.
Forty-eight hours later, I emerged triumphant from under colonies of dust bunnies. Every single one of my books has been catalogued. The total number has been reduced to an even thousand. Most of the shelves now contain just one layer of books, so the titles are actually visible. I feel invincible! (You have to be drowning in books to understand this.) For the next few weeks, at least, my universe is in order.
* * *
E-mail your comments and questions to emotionalweatherreport@gmail.com.