Page 26 - WTP VOl. X #4

19
Throwing the Books Away
“They smell like mildew,” she said.
“That’s the smell of great literature,”
I said. “I read these in college—my parents
read them, too.” Then I reached for a book
by Melville that I’d never actually read but
always meant to, opened it up and took a whiff.
“They smell like your parents too,” she said,
who are dead and moldering, too. Let them go.”
“You’re killing me,” I said, and dragged a forefinger
across the spines of several metaphysical poets.
“No,” she said, “the mold and the mildew and the booklice are killing you. I’m trying to save you.”
So I packed them up in some large bins
and threw my back out trying to lift them
into the hatchback, which, let me tell you, hurt
less than when the used bookseller told me
he wouldn’t buy any of them, couldn’t sell them, didn’t want them. Then I tried giving them away
to the library, high school, Boy Scouts, YMCA,
but no takers. So I left them in the hatchback
and drove around with them for weeks, their dead weight shifting this way and that like so many
dead poets tied up in the trunk. Soon the car reeked of great literature. I developed a cough,
a nasty postnasal drip, and a rash that wouldn’t resolve itself. So I took them to the transfer station
and the single-stream recycling receptacles.
“We don’t recycle books,” said the recycling guy.
“But these are some great books by some great writers,”
I said. “Ok,” he said, “if you remove the bindings and glue, and rip all the pages out, I can let you leave them here.” For well over an hour, dear reader, I ripped the hair
and guts out of greatness, and it felt like a desecration, destroying those books just to find a place for them
in the world. But as the words of the towering dead
mixed with the things of this world—junk mail, milk jugs, old calendars, pizza boxes, cat food tins, and all manner of indispensable details—I began to feel, inexplicably, better.
Paul hoStovSky