the tacit pleasure of the book

i spent the day today arranging books on the shelves upstairs...i really love working with books, it feels so wholesome and good. i love handling them, remembering them, and just gazing at them there on the shelf. they just make me feel very good somehow. many of them conjure up memories...of classes where i had to read them, of airports where i bought them and sat and read them for hours, of holidays where i carried them around in a backpack, of libraries where i made notes in the margins, of helping my father-in-law with his translations of his work on technolution (a field of study he invented and was the first professor of at lund university), of bookstores i wandered as i lovingly selected them. i love paging through and looking at what i've written in the margins or underlined or where i've put a little sticky note to mark a passage. it's like a flash of insight into who i was at the moment of previous reading. i surely wouldn't be that same reader if i reread the book today...i would underline new passages, as surely new things would speak to me. i even feel that way reading recipe books...i look at the recipes i marked in the past...totally dependent upon the mood of that day and very often i mark a whole new set of recipes as i go through. it's rather fascinating to think we can be one reader one day and another one the next.