The Luggage
The past week was my busiest yet in lockdown — yes, we are still in a Corona virus prompted lockdown in the holy land — and in between the now de rigueur Zoom calls, emails, text messages and a host of social feeds vying for my already absent-minded attention; I managed to get in some time for walks and delving into the depths of the bookshelf in my current lodgings.
I find myself with a bookshelf that is basically a little more than half of Terry Prachett’s Discworld series, an odd assortment of non-fiction, some religious texts and a bunch of poetry. Maya Angelou, Gibran, Tagore and Ben Okri feature alongside a well-worn copy of Wordsworth. Works from Zeynab Joukhadar and Nadia Hashimi, nestled almost enviously against Piaf, Simone Berteaut’s epic memoirs, and a half-read copy of Notes From The Underground.
There’s enough range and variety in there — and I’ve now read (and in some cases, re-read) a fair chunk of the makeshift bookshelf. I’ve skipped going through Nadine Gordimer’s, A World of Strangers in favour of Biko’s I Write What I Like and have made progress with Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa. There are copies of Chocolat, The Ground Beneath Her Feet and A Passage to India, stacked against The Plains of Camdeboo. The big news from the lockdown prompted reading fest, is that I finally finished up Oran Pamuk’s The Red-Haired Woman. It was okay but if I had to re-read just one of his books, I’d choose Silent House.
Probably because it’s my preferred environment for reading or as a particularly funny former entanglement said: maybe I manifest the silent house because I want to read? Either way, it’s just played out like that for the better part of my reading life and it’s now manifest as a choice. I’m always impressed by the people who can read a book while lounging on a towel in the midst of a packed beach where — I’m invariably more drawn to the endless people watching — especially when they are stripped of the basic armour of too much clothing. But before I get lost in happy memories of a misspent adulthood; let’s get back to the idea of reading a good book in a quiet space — ideally your own space but really anywhere with a kettle; a well-stocked fridge, a fireplace, a view and any combination of pillowy couch, hammock and a swimming option. Good company should be a given in such conditions but that itself is rarer than well-worn first editions. And altogether more precious for its rarity.
A comfortable cottage on the banks of the Marico, an elegantly simple pad nestled on a ridge in the foothills of the Magaliesberg range, a lovingly reworked Karoo barn, a fishing cottage with a sheltered garden, the (surprisingly comfortable) seat of a parked combine harvester in a huge field and even the wee hours of a long haul flight, have all served as go-to choices to get into and through a book or three; beautifully distracting company permitting.
The current bookshelf itself is a salvaged wooden pallet, stood on end against a bare wall, at a slight angle with the books stacked and leaning against each other. It looks cool — until you decide that you want the book at the bottom end of the pile. That is when you start to have the feeling that maybe it is time to finally root a little and get a regular bookshelf. It will at least ensure less time doing yoga poses to get to books and more time reading. The books themselves are also salvaged — at least from those found in boxes from different eras in my life and with a smattering of the newer titles from recent pre-lockdown work travels.
Going through the boxes, I have found that at the end of differing eras in my life-of-much-movement; I have packed and shipped off or dropped off a box or three at my parents home in the little village on the periphery of Durban. The boxes were inevitably stacked away in a corner of the garage — the rest of the house being full of their own detritus from fifty years of lives with rather less movement than their errant middle child’s. And it is in going through these boxes over the past few months that I have found books that I love, those that I still cannot bring myself to read and those that make me question the state of my sanity when I bought them.
And as I start to close out this chapter of my journey of much movement, ponder life and living options and possibly entertain the idea of rooting myself somewhere; I wonder at how many of these books will make it into a box labelled ‘Books / month / 2020.’ And in which garage or storage unit they will end up in for however long it takes me to get to them again, and then hopefully dust them off and set them into what might be the last bookshelf they will live on for the foreseeable future. These thoughts are no less vexing, knowing that there is a whole storage unit on the edge of Jozi Town that holds another couple of stacks of boxes with more books that bring as much joy to me as engaging company on a moonlit night looking out over Slaapstad.
Either way, the choice is made and the process underway. Research tells us that moving living arrangements is right up there with seriously stressful stuff like death and marriage and I’ve occasionally felt this in a life of much movement. This time though I’m arguably less traumatised by the idea of moving — a dear friend reminded me that she reckons I count amongst that rare adult — that is able to move physical spaces with apparent ease and make connections and a home wherever I find myself.
I reflected on this comment during the sunrise walk a few mornings ago and figured her assessment was pretty much on-point; except that she forgot to mention the few boxes of books that resolutely follow me wherever I go.
And if you’re a Pratchett fan, then you will know, that’s a bit like having your own Luggage and that can’t be half-bad.
