Monday, December 03, 2001
|10:07 PM|
My uncle and I don't really have the standard sort of conversations. We are a little too different, a little too much on incompatible wavelengths. This is not to say that we don't talk, we do, but our only meaningful conversation seems to be in the exchange of books and the discussion of books we've been reading.
He has a remarkable library, he constantly prowls around used books stores amassing these huge collections of cheap literature. That's where I got my copy of Lolita, and where I just got my annotated copy, and Nabkov's autobiography. Whenever we are discussing a particular book and I ask to borrow it, my uncle will scurry around the house, peering under shelves, looking through closets, searching bins, but he always seems to find the book in the small bookcase near the stereo. I got this image of him always shuffling the books around, as if his whole system of memory was external, and instead of shaking things around in his head, he moved particular books from the back storage areas to the small cookcase. Bringing these to the forefront of his mind, and moving older subjects back into his darkened closets. When he needs to communicate with me, he gets a box and throws a bunch of the better things he has been reading together, and I pick them up. I read through them, and that's a conversation. Then he goes back to re-arraging the books, swapping ancient histories of Greece for literature on recent warfare blunders.
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//That should close up the previous year.
///Say this is the swap from 2001 to 2002, that should close up the 2001 links.
///Problem is, we also need to close up the final month links too.
/// echo '