I suspect the room in which I call home is growing weary of me. There are books stacked two, three deep along every wall, in every available space. Atop the radiator, wedged behind the door, the very structure holding up my bed. It presses in on me.
There is a strange comfort in the suffocation. The weight of it all feels both oppressive and protective. When I rouse from the sheets, I inch across the hardwood on my tip toes. When I don’t, I sleep next to them like lovers. Sometimes I wonder if it will all come crashing down one night.
The kind of hunger I am feeding is a hunger for possession, for the feeling of having. I gather the books like ballast, as if they tether me to the world. But I remain buoyant in the worst way. Unmoored. In what I read people fall in love, fall apart, disappear entirely, and are always just outside the radius of my being, as if the important parts of life miss me by inches.
I consider the possibility that I might be addicted to the act of acquisition. Not to reading exactly, but to wanting. Sometimes it’s enough just to hold a book in my hand, to imagine what it might say about me. I want certain people the same way. Because they look good from a distance. On a shelf, their presence suggests something about me I’m not sure is actually true.
When I tell people I study English, they laugh, a kind of offhand amusement, a casual disdain reserved specifically for things that are both beautiful and impractical, and ask: “Do you plan to do anything with that?” An expression I’ve grown used to, a quiet insinuation that what I am doing is somehow a waste of time. That I, in my efforts, lack a tangible purpose. I want to say yes. I want to say I am doing it right now, with my whole body, look, the way they have colonised my life. The way I read until the light goes.
I am so busy watching myself become someone else as I read, constantly caught between who I was and who I want to be. It is a kind of violence, one I have no choice but to take part in. This is the doing. The destruction is as necessary as the reconstruction. I’d ask them, if I could: “What would it mean to do something with literature? Because I think I already have.”
And yet, in this constant transformation, there’s latent tension between what I’m actively engaging with and what I’m simply accumulating. The process of changing is hindered by the very thing I’m trying to build: the weight of passive consumption.
The idea of passive consumption permeates much of what we do. We take in content in the same way we consume food – much too quickly and without thought. In a way, it’s symptomatic of a culture that values output over process. We’re constantly equating productivity with worth, with the idea that success is measured by how much we can consume. But this approach to knowledge in a general sense, neglects the value of a pause, of reflection, of the kind of intellectual digestion that happens when we read actively, not passively. When we sit with the idea long enough for it to take root in our minds.
I think of my own relationship with books, it has become clear how this kind of passive consumption has crept into my habits. The piles of books that are stacked on every surface are a reflection of my struggle with the gap between acquisition and participation. I collect books because I am afraid of not having enough, not knowing enough. I sit in the thick of the clutter and I am still no closer to knowing. It is paradoxical, the books as both a source of comfort and a reminder of my inadequacy.
At this point, the metaphor has become literal. My room is collapsing under the weight of paperback.
