A Place of Refuge and Reflection

There was a time when I thought I would be able, in my lifetime, to read all those works necessary to be well-educated, well informed and somewhat wise. For various reasons, I went off on several tangents, read a ton of material of little or no immediate value to one who would seek wisdom, engaged in other activities, and missed the target by a long way. The first and most obvious reason is that the target was silly and ill-informed to begin with and the product of an undeveloped intellect from the outset. There was a surfeit of worthy material before I ever conceived of the idea, and the parade of new material has hardly let up in the intervening years, so that I’m falling farther behind even as I work through my oft-redefined list of what constitutes the right matter for reading. This occurs to me with increasing frequency as we approach the end of the calendar year, which inevitably signals a torrent of “best of” lists. This helps me to see how little of a dent I’ve made in the literary pile, it gives me a sense of the scope of the production of the book mill, lends a focus to my sense of the expanding universe and leads me to reflect on where I am in this process. We need to add that this also applies not only to other forms of print, newspapers and periodicals, largely, in addition to the nuggets that come in the form of music (with or without lyrics), film, live drama and social interaction.

We don’t collect books the way some folks do. Generally, I read a book, ask Erica if it interests her, and following her use of said book, we look for a place to park it so that it will continue to be read in somewhat the same manner as certain plastic crab traps, once lost, would continue to kill crabs until something either buried them or they were broken up. The library is a good place for some of them, though we can never be sure that our lonely little contribution will be able to call out to potential readers before the physical book goes the way of the aforementioned crab trap. We also target friends and relatives who read, though this is also a bit of a crap shoot as people will smile at the site of a book from us, thank us profusely, and recycle it as soon as we’re out of sight, Who knows?

Having lead a fairly tranquil life, I still have recordings going back to something Maggie gave me when I was seven years old, a Saint’s Day present. It was a collection of stuff by some black women singers, principally Billie Holliday. I still like it and I suspect that I might have gotten this gift because it was to be part of the general family music education and because Maggie might well have wanted to have it around for her listening pleasure. I guess multiple justifications are fine, and when I was seven, I wasn’t one to question a mother’s motives. I have vinyl going right into the Eighties, a bunch of CDs and a rather hefty collection of digital files through iTunes, Wolfgang’s Vault, eMusic, CDBaby, ripped CD files and the odd free download from Joe Bonamassa and suchlike. In spite of this, all these download sites show clearly that I’m losing the race to own all the music I like. Here again, a problem arises in that my musical horizons keep opening up, meaning that, even though I’m losing the Blues race, and the Jazz race, there’s much in the Classical bin that is, and will remain, untouched for lack of time and other resources.

A serious question that arises from this discussion: what drives us to this impulse to “complete the set”, even when we know that the set will never be complete? Perhaps some of the cause lies in the barrage of advertising that confronts us at every turn, or perhaps this phenomenon is a result of other unmet needs. My answer? It’s not such a big deal, as long as we can keep our perspective. As long as the parade of content continues to get distilled into some vision of increasing wisdom, and as long as I don’t get walled in to a too-narrow definition of wisdom because of self-selection of content, there isn’t too great a cause for distress. However, we might give a thought to how we direct our energies: is all this creation making for better lives?