the collector of things

He collected words and things. He’d been doing this since his forties, after reading an anthology of surrealist detective stories. It had been a paperback with a body in red on the black cover, the smell of the book was very different from the minimal purity of the cover. . The copy he’d got in the bookstore also had a touch of the newness that inevitably permeates books in transition from the warehouse to the pocket of the reader. Perhaps he did not buy the anthology. Although he periodically made the rounds of libraries and bookstores, he bought few of the books on offer, perhaps one or two at a time. He had a library in his house divided up into categories, one section which he found impossible to keep in order consisted of orange books. Another of handbooks, for example on book collecting and gardening, his garden was as mostly a set of plant objects inherited from when he’d moved into the house, so the gardening handbooks were a utopian hope he’s one day understand what growing objects meant, he considered himself ignorant. Another section a mixture of philosophy and fiction, Another on cats. He didn’t have a cat because they had all died long ago. All he had left of them were memories and the occasional photograph he found in a black box (book, album, picture library on the computer). There was a handbook on thermodynamic machines, common engineering tasks, the history and how to make screws and how to repair cars from before he was born. True, he had no need for most of these books but useless knowledge was better in books than in his head he thought. He had acquired the anthology of philosophical essays on fetishes because of the clone of a tree on the cover. As it happened he knew that such a tree did not exist, but that was the very reason it had appealed to him. He took the book to the cashier in a somewhat uneasy state. Touching the machine with his card. It seemed somehow unfitting for a man his age to show an interest in anthologies. It was almost like avoiding reading philosophy. Fortunately the salesgirl didn’t take note of the title. All she did was look at the price and merely scanned the barcode ‘ping’. Touching the machine with his card. He knew a thing or two about such things of course not not from personal experience in this case, but through his thumbelinaish heart, was that necessary? Most likely people learn such awareness unconsciously. It cannot be otherwise as we are all constructs. When he started reading the book, the unease returned, despite the fact that he was alone. He found relief with the thought that the anthology should not be considered a handbook. After he had finished the anthology, he wondered what to do next. The notebook was nowhere near to being filled, it had barely been touched. Could he leave it like that? It would be as if he’d merely chipped off a bit of beauty. No, he had to continue. There had to be many more words. They all deserved to be in one place. Perhaps here we should speak of his collection of pens in a crystal pen tray…

Originally published at https://www.driftwork.work on January 26, 2021.