There has been a bit of a pause on this blog...

Understatement.

There has been a two-year gap on this blog.

And even now this post is a bit of a cheat, I suppose.

I first thought of airing it when I wrote about Henry James in July, and was trying to reconstruct what I'd read already.

It's not a Velvet Cushion piece. And it's definitely not a Purple Tern piece. But -- if you stretch your definitions a bit -- it might be a Vintage Travel piece.

It is definitely "vintage" (it's a diary piece I wrote on 7 June 2011).

And it is "travel" (it's about the books we give away because we're moving on, and what they say about us).

So here goes...

*_*_*


Where we were the week I wrote this: Melbourne, June 2011

I referred in a recent blog post to the Bildungsroman that is narrated by our book collections, and I noted that mine had had lots of pages torn out because I'd given so many books away.

I can't reacquire the Bildungsroman in its entirety, but I can at least pay homage to some of its missing contents.



Chapter 1 -- novels

Novels always stand a good chance of being kept. I find I can't live without stories.

But sometimes you just don't like things (like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera), or sometimes you maybe read things too soon (I turfed out some Iris Murdoch, for example, that I would love to read again, all these years later).

"Light" literature is particularly vulnerable to the times when a practical reason for a book cull (like moving house) brings out my pretentious side. Unfortunately, many vastly enjoyable (but sadly popular) novels have been sacrificed to this misplaced worthiness. Special mention must go to a whole batch of Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries (how I could have got rid of this wonderfully entertaining evocation of 20s and 30s British society I have no idea).

The book-snob side of me has, I'm afraid, sometimes justified "wasting" time on crime fiction or spy fiction by reading it in a foreign language. The fact that these volumes have been not only entertaining but also instructive doesn't help them, however, at give-away time. So my fine collection of Agatha Christie (in French, German, Spanish, and Italian) has bitten the dust. (I still think Agatha Christie is your best choice for a "first read" in a foreign language, and I have recently re-proved that theory with Indonesian.) Being present in several languages didn't save P.D. James either. Even Georges Simenon's fabulous Inspector Maigret series -- depicting a world so quintessentially Gallic that you could almost smell the croissants off its pages -- succumbed to the guillotine. Johannes Mario Simmel's creepily atmospheric (but unabashedly popular) portrayals of Cold War Europe met the same fate. Likewise, Mario Puzo's Il Padrino. There is a definite injustice here. Frederick Forsyth's The Odessa File (in Spanish, therefore mine) has gone, while other titles by this same author (in English, therefore Nigel's) are still here.

Now, I'm not proud of this snobby trait, and I think it has decreased with time. But it can't be denied. How else can you explain that these beloved story-tellers have been banished, while Proust (who is, I am convinced, totally unreadable either in French or in English) is still sitting here in the bookcase?



Chapter 2 -- languages

It will be evident from Chapter 1 that one of my earliest ambitions was to speak lots of languages. I think I got this (along with my love of travel) from Elinor M. Brent-Dyer's Chalet School books (and of course these extraordinarily formative stories were long ago dispatched by the adolescent version of my book-culling self).

At university, a good academic counselling service would have tried to break me of this language-learning mania, but no, I majored in German, and took ineffectively meagre subsidiaries in both Spanish and Italian (thus very efficiently ensuring that I can never remember anything of either except when trying to speak the other). Post-uni, I realized it had been a very foolish thing to petulantly cast seven high-school years of French aside, and had to try to rapidly revive it. (French and German are now the only ones I can read really fluently in. Spanish is probably next, with Italian a bit of an also-ran.)

But not satisfied with this pot-pourri of half-learnt languages, I occasionally felt the wholly irrational urge to tackle a little Dutch, or gain a smattering of Arabic, or try to resurrect some schooldays Latin. All the monuments to these pieces of folly have been evicted.

I haven't quite rid myself of my ambition to learn Russian, however. Possibly this zombie-like aspiration owes itself to memories of those totally zany weekend introductory courses I did, in the middle of winter, at a "socialist country club" somewhere in the south of England (where my fellow-students included fervent admirers of Soviet Russia, an expert in Old Church Slavonic, a couple of Greenham Common women, and a clearly uber-rich gentleman who atoned for his possession of a fabulously expensive car by dropping copious quantities of cash into the "support the Kent miners" bucket). Be this as it may, a number of Russian textbooks sit anachronistically but still expectantly on the shelves.

And then there's Manx, of course... One day, I am determined to learn the language of my forefathers. One day...



Chapter 3 -- travel

Travel is as much a part of my psyche as novel-reading and language-learning. So, travel books have to be pretty bad to be turfed out (like Lucretia Stewart's excruciating The Weather Prophet: A Caribbean Journey, which plunges immediately into the "too much information" category, or Peter Mayle's direly overblown and insanely oversold A Year in Provence).

But we're not the kind of people to keep out-of-date Lonely Planet books just for the nostalgia value. Many guide-books have therefore hit the high road over the years.


Gippsland, June 2011

Chapter 4 -- art

Whereas my current bookshelves still pretty faithfully reflect my love of European literature, they no longer capture the discovery of European painting that was an unexpected bonus of my early travels. Desperately trying to REMEMBER all the amazing things I had seen, I lugged home books of paintings by artists as diverse as Marc and Botticelli.

I guess you slowly realize you can't remember everything. And our focus became much less European. So these were given permission to leave.

This still doesn't explain why we got rid of all the Snoopy books, though...



Chapter 5 -- teaching

After cavorting in the Elysian fields of language and literature at university, I had to adjust to the ludicrously prosaic world of the chalk-face... And training to be a teacher necessitated a foray into a social sciences literature that I found extremely alien and offputting. (In fact, memories of how much I'd disliked it worried me a lot when I was contemplating a politics Master's, but either I'd adjusted better to reality, or the field was much more interesting.) Anyway, my education tomes got me the qualification, and I never consulted them again. (In fairness, I think much better stuff is written now, that it would repay me to revisit.)



Chapter 6 -- religion

Yes, I did this too... I not only read stuff from established religions, some of which I've kept, but also an array of "popular spirituality" and/or "self-help" material that I now find fairly cringe-worthy... No doubt it fulfilled a need in its time. Christianity I was very serious about, gradually acquiring a mini-library to accompany my two years of theological and cultural studies (and, yes, this did include New Testament Greek and Old Testament Hebrew...). But when I finally figured out that I wasn't cut out for a career in this area, much of the material became redundant. Time to move on again...



Chapter 7 -- business and accountancy

This, gentle reader, is the bizarrest chapter of Prudence's Bildungsroman...

Unsure about the literacy-teaching I had contemplated doing in Africa, frustrated with language-teaching in the UK, not convinced about comparative literature as a future career path to anywhere at all, and unable to find a logistically possible interpreting course, I became obsessed with the idea that "something to do with business" was my answer. So, as well as learning to type properly (in the days when you still had to manually create tables and "centre" things), I also immersed my free hours in all sorts of businessy things -- shorthand, economics, book-keeping, languages for commerce...

I even convinced myself -- and it is still a mystery to me how -- that a career in accountancy would supply all that was lacking in my life... Luckily, a merciful Providence (using the strategy of not letting me get beyond any first interviews) ensured that these crazy ambitions came to nothing. I'm sure I railed against an unfair world at the time. But I'm terribly grateful to it now.

When I fell into the first of several fascinating jobs in publishing (now why had I never thought of publishing -- such an obvious choice for a bibliophile?), this little section of the library stack bit the dust as well.



Chapter 8 -- the still-being-written, eternal present

The residue of all these chapters (except Chapter 7, which is pretty much lost without trace) is still on the bookshelves. But it is much diminished, and has been diluted by an influx of new things.

The novel collection is building up again, but there's a lot more Asian material now. And I'm still a language nut, but it's Indonesian that's the current focus. (Plus a tiny bit of Thai... And if we go back to New Zealand, I'll have another crack at Maori...) Travel has merged with current affairs and history, and now includes (some) Africa and (lots of) Asia-Pacific. Art doesn't get bought much these days (but old habits die hard, and Realism in Asia came home with me from an excellent exhibition in Singapore last year...) The same can be said for spirituality/self-help (I'm embarrassed to say that Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love roosted briefly in our home -- but only briefly). If I buy material on religion these days, it's usually part of an attempt to understand Islam better.

The big new kid on the block, of course, is the combined field of International Relations, politics, and Asian studies. In different proportions these have been my focus of intellectual attention since 1996. Their associated books now occupy a lot of real estate on the shelves, and see a lot of consultative traffic.



Conclusion

In some ways, this recreated Bildungsroman is depressing. So much time, mental energy, and money apparently dissipated...

But I'm going to choose to find it inspiring. I like the fact that I've been interested in lots of things. They all (well, maybe not Chapter 7...) have a bearing on what I do now. (Even Chapter 7 inspires quaint homilies to students.)

Most of all, they all have a bearing on what I AM now. You can't really detect last week's lamb chop in any particular cells in the body, but the product of the nutrition is nevertheless there. So too, the person that is me is (partly at least) the product of all that literature, art, religion, etc. Digestion goes on in the dark. But it still happens.

In fact, it never stops happening.