Spring cleaning

My wife is a devotee of clean surfaces. Clutter distracts her, unsettles her, and makes her grumpy. Alas for her, she married a man who is both a pack rat and a stacker. I rarely throw anything out if I can think of the least excuse to save it, and view any available surface as a resource waiting to accommodate books, papers, and CDs.

Right now I'm in the midst of a Grand Dislocation: the spousal foot has come down, and come down hard, on all my iniquities: stacks, piles, clumps, and, of course, heaps have to go. Heart-wrenching decisions have to be made, and salty tears spot the covers of books read, reread, and unread, the accumulation of forty-five years.

Piled up (what else?) in front of the living-room wall of bookcases, they testify to spiritual pilgrimages (most of the Anglican books and some of the Orthodox books are going, while most of the Catholic books stay), jobs held (the publishing business is a bibliomaniac's paradise), enthusiasms of years gone by (the Buddhist books are almost all there), and self-imposed courses of study that never got past the intro phase (What can I say? I really did mean to learn Chinese.)

Still 0n the shelves is the evidence of lifelong obsessions: Mormonism (a particular source of uxorial unrest), esoterica Western and Eastern, Hasidism and Kabbalah. And there are still-growing collections I race against time to master, as if purgatory were a comprehensive exam: philosophy (Will I ever get through Fichte and on to Schelling and Hegel?), with the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin occupying a shelf and a half; theology, Barth and Balthasar in the lead; and biblical studies, Von Rad and Bultmann and Childs and a yard of unread commentaries; the case full of poetry. I'm fast running out of strategies to keep them hidden from wifely eyes. Double shelving? Of course. Closets? Just about full. Apartment living has its limitations.

For the unsentimental, ebooks beckon—like music, they occupy no space—but not for me; the pixel will never replace the page. The feel, the smell, the weight of a book are beyond the capacities of Kindle, iPad, or Nook. (Though if you want to give me one of those—especially the iPad—I wouldn't object.) So DW and I will continue our marriage-long struggle, the minimalist aesthetic of the Ryoanji temple versus the joyous prodigality of the Strand Bookstore. And I'm afraid I know who'll win in the end.