Where's Waldo?

Today I have some books missing. Now, I always have books missing, somewhere or other. Many of them are lost to the ages, that I lent to people whom I no longer ever see, like the pothead who ran the coffee shop in Lockport when I was in high school, or the son of my family doctor. Others, I just don't see around my bookshelves anymore and can simply not account for. The white whale of these books is the Norton Anthology of Poetry (Shorter Edition), which I had to buy for English 121, in 2004, and which fell into a black hole shortly thereafter. But. This white noise of lost books is nothing at all compared to the freakout in which I engage when I lose a book which I am in the middle of reading. This has happened before, as documented here, when I left Gargantua and Pantagruel at a Buffalo Bisons game, and couldn't handle 24 hours before buying a new one. Now, the book I have lost is Ralph Waldo Emerson's Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems, a book that my facebook Visual Library says I've been reading for eight months.

I kind of have; I keep starting it and then getting distracted and then deciding that the part where I pick up isn't resoundingly Emersonian enough and starting again at the beginning. But now, I don't know where it is, and I find this troubling. Should I clean out all of our cars? Look in the refrigerator (I've found books there before)? Last night, after looking for it at my uncle and grandfather's houses, I went to Barnes and Noble and stood looking at the outside of the book for like twenty minutes, wondering whether or not to spend $4.95 on a new one. To put how hard of choice this really should've been in perspective: I spent more than twice that much this weekend buying shots of Ouzo for the bartender. But I didn't buy it, then went home and sat around scowling that I didn't have any books of Emerson to read. I tried reading some Civil Disobedience, but it just wasn't the same.

Thinking about it, I have no idea why I didn't just buy a new damn Selected Essays &c. I have some things underlined in my current copy, but nothing that's really lighting the world on fire. Most, in fact, are things that I got all excited about from recognizing them from other things that referred to Emerson, like the epigram to Then We Came to the End (Is it not the chief disgrace in life, not to be considered a unit?) or things that Bootie Tubb really liked from the Emperor's Children. I guess I just like having lost books. I wish them well; I hope that they are doing right by whoever has found them. (The big exception in this case is my copy of High Fidelity, which was lent out and which, I have on good authority was unread and then later dropped in a ditch and not recovered, sad, sad.) So. I think I will resign to another lost book, and by another copy later today, and keep it on my shelf next to my successor copy of Gargantua and Pantagruel. A proud spot, indeed.