i am sitting on the floor putting one book at a time onto the bathroom scales, trying to find the best combination of books to make two piles of 10 kg exactly, to go into two speedpost saver box. for $130 they will deliver up to 10kg. (regular air, for the same weight, is $143, surface is half the price but takes 2 months) and do you have any idea how many books make up 10 kg?! on average, just 15! am i supposed to go to school with just 30books?!) i had simply assumed that two speedpost boxes (they look quite large) would take the majority of my books, and the spillovers can go in my suitcase, but after i tried weighing - well - i'll have to prioritise, won't i?so books are carefully being sorted into three lots: a life-or-death ten that go in my suitcase (this will include the three nootebooms and the analogy of the faerie queene,) the 20kg of very essential books that will arrive within a week of my arrival and will hopefully be enough for life cornerstones and such) and a further 20kg that will arrive surface mail in november, or december, if i get on with posting them quickly.
so far, my own choice of books to go in suitcase surprise me - they look random and don't go with each other (case in point: i'm bringing a latin dictionary but not a single latin book to use it for) but then, on reflection, they are not books i will read but books that would give me comfort through my first night in boston. being in the same room as a good dictionary is always reassuring, and the multicoloured wrapper of the latin dictionary is by now a familiar sight, it'd certainly trick me into believing i've lived in the room a long time. my short history of riddles is in the suitcase not because i want to read it - i haven't the least intention of rereading it - but it is there as a kind of reminder of my thesis, and what i have come to harvard equipped with. the three nootebooms naturally because they are some of my favourite books this life time, and no book ever spoke to me as much as the following story. a copy of robert langbaum and one of frye's fools of time, not because i particularly care abt the dramatic monologue or shakespearean tragedy, simply becos they are the first books i've possessed that belonged to my first mentor, and though he is not here i feel a little strength (the psychometry of touch?) as if the inheritance of books is simultaenously an inheritance of - not knowledge - but of - that same spirit of knowledge he had? perhaps the most surprising thing that went in the suitcase was joyce's portrait of the artist as a young man. i hadn't thought about it as a favourite before, and had quite forgotten i had it, having read it only once before, and rather hurriedly, for a class - but when i had it in my hands i knew it was going in the suitcase - curious how i could have not thought of it so many years - and all i had was a memory - but a memory of how it spoke to me for one trembling moment - and a strong intuition that this is a book that will come to mean more and more to me in the coming years. then i decided on a milton - the only touch of "canon" - but even here the choice was uncharacteristic - i'm taking not my familiar longman paradise lost, edited by the alastair fowler, but the complete shorter poems. this unpremediated decision also surprised me, but then i seem to be letting myself be guided by intuition and even - touch - inexplicable as that sounds.