Thursday, June 2, 2016

Useful Fictions

Started the biannual vacuuming of the bookshelves and their attendant books this evening with the small bookshelves in the living room and the even smaller bookshelves outside the door. There's plenty more to vacuum, but I'm still clearing ordinary work-related tasks, so I needed to start small. Time was when the performance of this task marked a distinctive break with my real job, but these days there's no thing as a distinctive stopping point. The Toad, work, leaks into everything, all the time.

What hasn't changed, though, is the curious sense of fulfilment I get as a result of all the cleaning. It has the entirely deceitful effect of convincing me I am somehow in control of my life. Always a useful fiction.

Almost as good as the assumption that in time to come I'll actually reread all the books on the shelves. Maybe it's time to unload a few?

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