The Reluctant Activist: How a Crisis of Books Led to a Social Awakening

I have too many books

I have had too many books for as long as I can remember, and my memory of book-ownership is lengthy and detailed. I confess that one part of my life has been lived in servitude to books. I am bothered by this only because I have spent a good deal of the past decade working with Tibetan Buddhist monks, and so my attachment to these books has been thrown into high relief by their lack of attachment to most everything that doesn't somehow benefit the lives of others. And since I was spending a lot of time around monks, I tried to get into the swing of things by finding ways to prove that my book-hoarding really did benefit others, but when that project failed, I had to admit that I am simply attached to them. I like the way they look, the way they feel in the hand, the way they smell. A fairly harmless attachment, I realize, but it was all mine, if you will, and the one that challenged me. After all, how hard could it be to get rid of a few books? I didn't really need them, and they certainly weren't benefiting others.

I knew from the outset that I was confronting a long-standing problem. The librarian of the small public library where I spent many afternoons as a child was forced to make a special dispensation for me because I was devastated by the three-book checkout limit. I say "devastated" because that is the verb my mother uses when she tells the story, and I say "forced" because who could resist the sadness of a young boy whose gusto for reading was being dampened by a library's checkout limit? Elements of a perfect storm converged on that library years ago: my mother's persistence, the librarian's benevolence, and my devastation. So, under that heavy weather, I was allowed to check out as many books as I could carry. As habits go, this was a bad one, born from good intentions, and it set in early—the idea that I ought to have as many books as I could tote.

But it has come to my attention that I have too many books because, as I was recently trying to lighten my load, I found my copy of Swiss Family Robinson, probably the Ur-book of my collection. Like all founding documents, this one is yellowed, battered, maybe even divine. It does, at least, smell divine if divinity can be said to have an odor: sweet, old, and unearthly. On the inside cover, I signed the book every time I read it, and the run of signatures provides a palimpsest of a boy's journey from innocence to experience. The first clumsy and labored ones give way gradually to a real cursive bragging, with a fancy, twirling underline—a dandy of a signature that would embarrass any right-thinking adult. But there they were on the endpaper of an insignificant book: shorthand ciphers of my emotional life. I could have been standing in the caves of Lascaux. I realized that many of my books, even without the signatures, carried a deep and sustained personal engagement with me. How could I just abandon them? I had recently been making some progress at averting this crisis of books, but now I was stopped cold. I realized I had too many books. I also realized that I would have to become something of an activist to pull off this purging. "Does anyone," the scholar and activist Judith Butler once wondered, "stand by the words they utter?" I felt as though I were caught in the crosshairs of that question. I had done a lot of talking—to myself mainly, but to the monks as well—and now it was time to stand by what I'd said.

I'd previously made several attempts to thin the herd. Normally these were...