I’d decided to do something I set out to do right about forever ago.
I wanted to rummage in a room where some of my fellow tenants have dumped their unwanted books. These fellows where old Norwegian souls. One dead of a heart attack and the other decided to move back to Norway. Gray and old with book jackets and blurbs of the 1960’s, they appeal my curiosity as they exude and oldness and an era rapidly turning into faded memories of old new tech and marketing props no longer in use and if so only to wake nostalgia in a time that can only allow manipulation for personal gain. The unwanted books with their technicolor drawings of drama gather dust this morning of late May 2015 as one more day finds them in a room seldom visited. Amongst Agatha Christie‘s detective penguin books, Arthur Conan Doyle and other hits of long ago, I went over some strange Norwegian titles, even more dusty cook books and a whole bunch of Danielle Steel books. Not surprising Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decamaron was to be found. Books about impending issues of what to do with time and other assorted books of whatnots. A whole lifespan flashed before me. Because I remember these people, in their old age, one alone, gray, wrinkled, reading Danielle Steel, knowing not what to do with the incessant call of the flesh and how to satisfy it; the other I imagined, most probably decided to fill the bookshelves with books just to spite the wife in an attempt to reclaim some sort of space for himself. So it crossed my mind, is this what life boils down to? When everything begins to unravel, do we resort to pleasure the brain with texts about pleasures we no longer are going to experience; the testament of what was read or was meant to be read or what interested the subjects, left in a room waiting to let go of their visual content to a chance someone like me might come and see what someone can rummage and rescue?
I found a Bukowski and a Nietzche.
I came back to my place and washed my hands. I saw the dust run with the water and the soap to make a greyish muck of sorts run down the drain of my sink. Two more books in my house of the many of which I don’t know I will ever read. But they make an interesting lot. One has already landed in my bathroom. Bukowski, where I understand, ought to be.