This Week in Thinking Too Much About Shakespeare

So, I took my show on the road this weekend, hoping to knock off some books. You will remember, from your slavish devotion to this website, that I am trying to pack in the ol' library a little, by means of reading some of these freaking books before buying more. It has gotten to the embarrassing point. When I meet women in bars, I am sick of the sheepishness with which I have to say, on presenting them with the wallet-sized photo of my bookshelves in my wallet, "Well, you know actually, I haven't read all of them...no, actually, I haven't really read about that, er, third in the middle". My dad doesn't impress patients with a bunch of diplomas on his office wall that he's thinking about getting. So anyway: trip to New York, booklight, big hopes about finishing Jane Mayer's the Dark Side, Ben Jonson's the Alchemist, and maybe putting a dent in Rabelais and his World. Way-ell, that is not what happened. Rather, I read thirty pages of the Dark Side, none of anything else, and wound up with a net gain of like 1000 pages on my increasingly onerous spreadsheet of pages left to conquer.

Part of this was not my fault (Christmas, magnanimity). Part of it was (outright theft). Happily, none of it was books bought, so at least I am doing ok in the "Don't Buy Books" part of my resolutions for a better life. I was not (imaginarily) peer pressured into buying these 1000 pages by cute booksellers; I did not do any mental gymnastics to convince myself things like, "If I didn't think I was supposed to tend bar on a particular day, but then did, the money made that day is free money and thus can be spent on books." But I got more books, nonetheless. I feel like Lyra Belacqua, and book pages are dust. Just unavoidable, given who I and what they are. So what am I going to do?

On the drive home from this eye-opening trip to New York, I did what you've been waiting for me to do ever since I called this feature what it's called, and I thought about Shakespeare. Specifically I thought about this:

...But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required,
Some heavenly music, which even now I do
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I'll drown my book.

(I love that he's going to bury his broken staff "certain fathoms" in the earth; not five or a few, but "certain".) That's right: I thought about, deeper than ever did plummet sound, drowning my books. Getting rid of 'em, something. But that seems like such a throwing-one's-hands-up-in-resignation thing to do. Prospero, shortly after this announcement, claims further that in Naples, in his post-libricide life, every third thought will be his grave. Unpleasant! So here's what I am going to do. I am going to view that spreadsheet as onerous no longer. It's not a list of books I haven't read, but a list of books that I have thought about having had read. Subjunctivity will save my face again. What a happy day! Also, I'm going to tell my dad what the hell, go ahead and throw that MA in Architecture he's always fantasized about right up on his wall.