![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It's all in the roll of the isocahedron
Apr. 6th, 2019 09:42 pmI've hit a tipping point in the book cull.
Instead of glum sacrifices of longstanding good intentions, a sort of confessional via donation pile, sometime during the afternoon letting go started to feel exhilarating.
Each book, I guess, holds a filament of my attention, and as each of these threads are released, they spring up and flare into brightness. That attention becomes available for other matters. Other books, even. Like releasing a thousand horcruxes at once.
I felt light. I felt clear. The more I gave up, the better I felt, until I thought, feverishly, What if I gave them all away?
I mean, at the end of today I still have in the keep section (that is, my house) between six and seven hundred books, at a rough estimate. I've probably set aside four hundred to give away.
It's been interesting to prize apart the different nodes of collection, the various urgencies I've attached to possessing these books.
Then, too, I have that magical thinking about books that leads to acquisitions like the sixty-year-old tome entitled The Icosahedron and the solution of equations of the fifth degree. (Sample back cover text: "This well-known monograph covers the solution of quintics in terms of the rotations of regular icosahedron around the axes of its symmetry.")
I think I mostly liked the orange cover.
(I do enjoy the beauty of mathematical concepts, and also of specialized prose I cannot fully understand -- the effect of struggling with it, of being forced into analogies, can be poetic, even haunting -- but I am still, after perhaps eight years of owning this book, not sure what an icosahedron is1, let alone a quintic.)
I'm not being wanton here, is what I mean. I want to reassure you.
I spent most of the day in a divestment trance. This evening, J. called on me and we tried to go out to see the touring show of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, only to discover that the tickets were for next Saturday. Excitingly, I was not the one who had the date wrong. I did, however, try to tell an anecdote about forgetting something similar and the realize that I couldn't remember the anecdote. We drank really well-composed cocktails instead.
So we failed the wisdom check, I guess, but lucked out on our lounge throw.
{rf}
1. I Googled it. It's a platonic solid! And a 20-sided die. That's cool. I may have to keep this one.
Instead of glum sacrifices of longstanding good intentions, a sort of confessional via donation pile, sometime during the afternoon letting go started to feel exhilarating.
Each book, I guess, holds a filament of my attention, and as each of these threads are released, they spring up and flare into brightness. That attention becomes available for other matters. Other books, even. Like releasing a thousand horcruxes at once.
I felt light. I felt clear. The more I gave up, the better I felt, until I thought, feverishly, What if I gave them all away?
I mean, at the end of today I still have in the keep section (that is, my house) between six and seven hundred books, at a rough estimate. I've probably set aside four hundred to give away.
It's been interesting to prize apart the different nodes of collection, the various urgencies I've attached to possessing these books.
Then, too, I have that magical thinking about books that leads to acquisitions like the sixty-year-old tome entitled The Icosahedron and the solution of equations of the fifth degree. (Sample back cover text: "This well-known monograph covers the solution of quintics in terms of the rotations of regular icosahedron around the axes of its symmetry.")
I think I mostly liked the orange cover.
(I do enjoy the beauty of mathematical concepts, and also of specialized prose I cannot fully understand -- the effect of struggling with it, of being forced into analogies, can be poetic, even haunting -- but I am still, after perhaps eight years of owning this book, not sure what an icosahedron is1, let alone a quintic.)
I'm not being wanton here, is what I mean. I want to reassure you.
I spent most of the day in a divestment trance. This evening, J. called on me and we tried to go out to see the touring show of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, only to discover that the tickets were for next Saturday. Excitingly, I was not the one who had the date wrong. I did, however, try to tell an anecdote about forgetting something similar and the realize that I couldn't remember the anecdote. We drank really well-composed cocktails instead.
So we failed the wisdom check, I guess, but lucked out on our lounge throw.
{rf}
1. I Googled it. It's a platonic solid! And a 20-sided die. That's cool. I may have to keep this one.
