I just finished reading one of Rosemary Sutcliff’s novels about Britain before 1,000 AD. My, how I love those books. This, Dawn Wind, was a new one for me, and it was worth every minute invested. Her words nourish me, and I’m grateful. I wonder if we often enough consider what sustains us beyond just protein and carbs.
In A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin writes, “Before he began, Alessandro leaned back in his chair and looked at the sky as if to take refreshment from the light.” That’s a lovely image, isn’t it?
So many books fill the shelves in my house. So many unread, so many forgotten, but still plenty that are cherished. Yet, something has changed. Well. I know what it is. It’s me. An inside-out life is what I’m living now, and it leads me to questions I never knew I could even ask. Questions like, “Do I really need or want all these books?” It’s really rather strange. I wasn’t kidding when I wrote in a recent Substack post that Alice Miller has made me a minimalist. You begin by pulling one lie off the shelf and getting it out of your life. Then, later—maybe days, maybe years—you pull another lie from the bookcase of your mind, drop it, and just walk away. Before you know it, you’re in a room you no longer recognize.
There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s the way it should have worked all along, but things get thorny when someone you know (and love?) comes to visit and gets shook by the absence of what seemed so integral to your very self and to their own.