Living in Dark Psyches

An Accidental Comparative Essay

I started alternating reading an unread book with re-reading a previously read book off my shelves somewhere in the midst of the pandemic lockdowns. It started largely as a question of how to organize shelves:

At the time I lived in a basement apartment. Like any reader, I always collected books faster than I read them, but this rate of pileup surged both because I went out of my way to buy books from indie bookstores to help keep them afloat, but also because people across the city were clearly using their lockdown time to read greater amounts. The streets of any given neighborhood in New York City, you must understand, were full of free books boxes. If I had actually grabbed every book I had wanted to at that point I probably would be a private library organization at this point. Instead I always limited myself to just two books from any given box.

Anyway, with more books than I could possibly read came the issue of more books than I had shelf space physically for. And when you’re bringing in new books and looking for space, of course you look to the old books to see what you can purge (and thus making a free box of your own to pass the dilemma on the next neighbor-reader). The first couple rounds of this are easy: most readers probably keep books they own that they read even if they don’t like them, because it’s usually mentally costless. Once the purge comes, those books leave soon.

However I definitely had a hefty few shelves of books I explicitly kept with the thought in mind, “One day I should re-read this.” And of course because I was bringing unread books faster than I was reading them, that “one day” got further and further away. Thus I finally purged down to the point where I hit all the books that I genuinely wanted to revisit. In order to get rid of them, I’d have to reread them as intended.

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That brings me to this Note I shared the other day:

This comment was really about the remarkably different experiences I had rereading The Tunnel by William Gass and The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen. My enjoyment of both books significantly changed, both because of my lived experience in between, but in opposite directions.

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I loved The Tunnel the first time I read it. I saw it as a portrait of the dark and hidden inner landscape of the American psyche, the stuff that we don’t like to talk about, including some of our own historic relationship with Nazism before the war.