I've found it impossible to replace with Collected/Complete volumes the slender ones for certain poets: Ammons, Bly, Merwin, Rich, etc. Those skinny books are a mental roadmap, a soul map. But then so are all the books in my overall library that have survived the many cullings over the years, including of course the ones I still haven't gotten all the way through or even dipped into yet: War and Peace, The Great Mother, Proust after Swann's Way, Johnson's complete ARK, etc. I keep trying to get further in Finnegans Wake (why?), and The Cantos (what!?), and Paradise Lost (ok by the line but deadly boring by the book). Has anyone ever read Sandburg's Complete cover-to-cover? Well ... it's Sunday, and as you can see I have too much time on my hands—which means, I guess, I should get back to Proust....
Truth be told I didn't dispose of any thin volumes. But they were relocated from their high place in my main library. They are not forgotten entirely, and I feel the same way about many of them, as you say, 'a soul map'.
3 comments:
I've found it impossible to replace with Collected/Complete volumes the slender ones for certain poets: Ammons, Bly, Merwin, Rich, etc. Those skinny books are a mental roadmap, a soul map. But then so are all the books in my overall library that have survived the many cullings over the years, including of course the ones I still haven't gotten all the way through or even dipped into yet: War and Peace, The Great Mother, Proust after Swann's Way, Johnson's complete ARK, etc. I keep trying to get further in Finnegans Wake (why?), and The Cantos (what!?), and Paradise Lost (ok by the line but deadly boring by the book). Has anyone ever read Sandburg's Complete cover-to-cover? Well ... it's Sunday, and as you can see I have too much time on my hands—which means, I guess, I should get back to Proust....
Truth be told I didn't dispose of any thin volumes. But they were relocated from their high place in my main library. They are not forgotten entirely, and I feel the same way about many of them, as you say, 'a soul map'.
Nice blog ppost
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