“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” – Hans Hoffman
Jesus said: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” – The Life of Jesus according to Matthew, 6:19-21
I have a confession to make.
I’ve been giving away my books – I mean the real ones, not just textbooks I never opened in the first place. Shocking, I know. When my literary friends hear me say that I’m emptying my shelves, gasps of horror leap from their lips. They clutch their faces and tear their hair. They look at me with wide eyes and whisper, “Why? Oh, Jonathan – why?” You have to understand: To them it’s akin to announcing that I intend to commit suicide. A good library reflects a good mind, good taste. It affords a chance to let others borrow the great stories and thoughts that make us who we are, that will make them think, or laugh, or stir them deeply (and that they will forget to return, or have marked all over when they return it, or bent the pages, or dripped all over with coffee and other assorted liquids)… a chance, in short, to bring goodness into the world. Also, a chance to show off – but that is neither here nor there. Giving all one’s books away is just not done.
Of course, I am moving to Chicago, which for many Southerners isn’t too far removed from a putting a bullet through my head.
The announcement about whittling down my library, on the other hand, draws blank stares from all those who don’t care how to spell literati. The riveting news that I’m getting rid of clutter is the kind of topic that means it’s time for them to take their small talk to someone else with a friendly “Oh! There’s so-and-so… I’ll talk to you later.” If that’s you, insert your own favorite thing in the blank, and you’ll understand. Like music albums. Or photographs. Or guns, cars, shoes, whatever.
At first clearing out my bookshelves was about saving money. Fewer boxes to pay for when I move will mean more Ramen noodles to eat after I stagger home from grad school in the evenings.
So I began by selling books online that I didn’t like that much. Most of them sold quickly, which I took as a compliment to my collection. Then I thought about my other books, the ones I like, the ones I re-read, the ones with memories breathed and hummed onto the lines and lines of letters and words, the ones that inspire me and give me hope. I picked them up and leafed through their pages for a while. They felt like old friends. Their worn backs lay just right in the palm of my hand. I was going to keep these. But there were still too many – the point was to cut moving costs, after all. Which to let go of? Which to keep? A battle between nostalgia and good sense raged in my head. I felt a migraine coming.
My mind did what it always does in situations like these: It wandered. I randomly pulled Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline from a stack behind me, opened it, and blankly looked at the chapter title “The Discipline of Simplicity.” I groaned. I remember this chapter well. Foster is a Quaker. Quakers hate pleasure, I thought. He thinks we should all walk around in rags from fifteen years ago and ride our rusty bike everywhere and never smile except with that wiser-than-thou grandfather-headnod of a smile you see on Episcopal priests and Buddhist monks who’ve just heard you actually believe in sin or something – or on Quakers who just heard you say you thought the sunshine was nice and it made you want to sing. (Or was that the Amish? Mormons? Puritans? Well, you get the point.) I panicked. I like sunshine. I like singing. I decided to throw the book on the sell-pile.
But my eye caught the first lines of the chapter. “Simplicity is freedom,” Foster begins. “Duplicity is bondage. Simplicity brings joy and balance. Duplicity brings anxiety and fear. The preacher of Ecclesiastes observes that ‘God made man simple; man’s complex problems are of his own devising.’”
Too true, I thought. Then I looked back down at the pile of books I wanted to keep. They seemed to stand for all my other complex problems – the dreams I don’t let go of, the fears I secretly cherish too much to overcome, the unanswerable questions that keep me up at night, the false impressions that I cannot seem to change, the petty triumphs that turn out to be less than that, the things I yearn for but cannot have, the nervousness about what will come, the many things I know I should stand above. I sighed.
Oh well, I thought. At least I can give the books to someone who cares about them in a way I want them to be cared about. That would simplify things.
And so I did.
I gave One Hundred Years of Solitude to my friend Nick at the coffee shop because he’d never read it – after I peeled about fifty post-it notes out of it.
I gave my favorite fairy tale, Stardust, to the girl who most deserves one.
I gave one book each to Jojo and Ashley, the two younger sisters of my college clique. Jojo, whose uncle is Cuban, got The Old Man and the Sea. Ashley likes the Victorians. I gave her Wide Sargasso Sea so she can move on.
By not reminding him that he still has my copy, I gave The Sound and the Fury to my photographer friend Phil, who is moving to Haiti, where there is enough of both.
And so on. Most of my favorites are gone now. I’ve never done anything that felt better.
I’m not writing this to brag. It’s not like I’m giving away Bibles or collector’s editions. Most of my books are bent and beat up, and I’ve scribbled things on them. Not all of them are great literature. Not all of them are moral. Some of them are trivial. The only thing that makes them special is that they are important to me.
What I want to make a point about is how ridiculously long it’s taken me to realize that it’s liberating to give away the things that mean the most to me, especially to people who I think will care about what I give, but can’t know how much. In a minor way, these books are my tunic and my cloak and my second mile. They are a part of who I am. Yet it is only when I give them away, when I stop wanting to control what, if anything, they will mean to the next person, it is only then that they become valuable, somehow, somewhere, to someone. To me.
As Paul says in his second letter to the church in Corinth: “Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. You should not give, wishing you could keep what you are giving. And you should not give if you feel like you have to give. God loves a cheerful giver. God can bless you with everything you need, and you will always have more than enough to do all kind of good things for others.”
So when I write about the virtue of simplicity, of simplifying, I’m not suggesting some fanatic scheme of disavowal, dishevelment, or self-disdain. It’s the opposite – one of the great paradoxes of the Kingdom of Heaven: The more of myself I give up, the more of Him I find in myself – and the more of Him others find in me, I hope.
Even in the very small things, the Kingdom of Heaven is now. May God always help me remember that.
You’re right. It has been very bizzare seeing you get rid of books. The one you gave me I took as quite a large gesture from you. I have always believed that personal gifts are the best ones. As much as I know how glad you are to get out of Searcy, in doing this, I think you’re leaving a good mark behind.
And I’m tempted to wonder, “Once he gets up there to Chicago…how long will it take him to accumulate that many more books?”
It’s hard to make yourself do it, but it does feel really good to give something away that you treasure.
Hey man, Ashley told me of your new blog. What happened to your old post about our friend the athletic director in rural AR who, though we barely knew him, affectionately referred to us as ‘little shits’ because we had upset his beauty sleep?
When I moved up here to CT I only brought about twenty books, the ones that I felt to be really necessary (some W.Berry, some CSL, Rob Roy (?)) only to find when entering my apartment for the first time, that built-in bookshelves line the walls, waiting for my huge library that I had to leave at home. I’ve already bought three new ones that should help fill up some space: the Metamorphoses, the Nicomachian Ethics, and the Timaeus – if you can’t tell, I’m on a classics kick.
Living in New England has been like stepping through a sort of American regional looking glass. It is in many ways like the South – it has the same agricultural sort of self-image, and shares a similarly intense dissident Christian history, which you can tell by some of the town names (like Tennessee and the war-torn Middle East, it also has a Lebanon) – though it’s long since backslid into a heathen hotspot for liberal no-goods, which is why Southerners consider it an outpost of the inferno.
May I have your Little Black Book?
I applaud you, I wasn’t able to give away many of my books, but I did leave them all on shelves at my parents house, where I hope my brother will scavenge through them and find something new. I’ve got it down to one box of books for the move, boy was that hard work.