Note: This essay is the result of a one-day writing workshop from rough idea to publish.
In college, I got rid of most of what I owned. I could carry everything I owned in a trailer behind my bike. I did not even own the trailer but borrowed it from friends. I wanted to live in a tent. I wanted to backpack in forests and sleep under the stars beside a mountain stream.
After a class on “Literature of the Wilderness” with poet Gary Snyder, my mind was filled with dreams of being a Chinese mountain hermit or living simply in a Zen Buddhist community. My days would be filled with meditation, walking in nature, and conversation around a shared meal. I loved books, but the university had a library and an inter-library loan system.
A hundred years slip by unnoticed
Eighty-four thousand cares dissolve in stillness
A mountain image shimmers on sunlit water
Snowflakes swirl above a glowing stove
- Stonehouse, China, 13th century
I remembered a story from one of these Chinese hermits a thousand years ago. He is sitting watching a barge on the river filled with the possessions of a rich family. The barge is on fire as the flames dance against the moving dark waters.
The summer after the class with Gary Snyder, I spent a summer studying in Japan, mostly in Tokyo, with a visit to Kyoto. At the university bookstore in Tokyo, I bought a copy of Walden Pond by Thoreau. Reading this essay about living alone in the woods while navigating the bustle allowed me to escape to my hermit’s cave on a remote mountainside.
Later I would marry a Japanese woman and live in Tokyo for six years with our kids in a tiny apartment. Returning to my second home in Seattle, we settled into a house, and I no longer had access to the university library. The local public library was a poor substitute. My wife taught at a Japanese school that our kids attended on Saturday. Saturdays became a day lived in bookstores. Slowly, a single bookcase became a library of 16,000 books. A chance encounter with a board game whose board was a cut-out map of Japan (Reiner Knizia’s Samurai) added board games to these Saturday expeditions. After a few years, I had 3,000 board games, which I would play with a group of friends every Friday night.
Books allow me to connect with the author and his sources. If a book had a footnote, I would hunt down the book and read it. I love Hans Peter Duerr’s Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Civilization, whose footnotes have footnotes. A five-hundred-page book is only 132 pages of text, followed by footnotes and a bibliography.
I wanted the full context of the argument as if I were engaging in a dialog with the author. One year I subscribed to four science fiction and fantasy magazines. When the annual awards rolled around, I had read most of what was on the nomination lists and even various community lists. I would nod at a choice I agreed with, commiserate about stories of those who missed winning, and even have some favorites that made no one’s list.
Once I was at a local used store, McDonald’s Books, with my friend Steve. “Why are you buying that book?” he asks, knowing I already have a copy of John Wyndam’s Midwich Cuckoos. But this is the first UK hardcover edition, and the cover art is amazing. I could have eight copies of the same book to collect all the covers.
With 16,000 books, I would get the simple question, “Why?” Some would ask how I organized my collection or how it fit in my house. “Have you read them all?” was a common question. I have a shelf of books about personal libraries larger than mine: 60,000 to 80,000. The shelf even includes a book on wooden card catalogs, reminding me of the Dewey decimal system of the university library.
At first, I played every board game I purchased. The urge to collect obscure games and games still in print before prices doubled eventually took over. Small elegant two-player abstract pieces with wood or stone pieces to sprawling beasts like Roads & Boats, which can take over an entire dining room table with both extensions added. What would be the setting for twelve around a Thanksgiving meal becomes a world unto its own, with its board constructed of colorful hexes as you figure out how to manufacture and ship goods with the cleverest routes.
My grown daughter and son-in-law moved back in two years ago. The family room turned library; every wall lined with bookshelves went into boxes and the garage. The garage was already filled with shelves stacked with board games. The family room was a small studio apartment, and there was a need for a walk-in closet in the garage. I found myself donating boxes of books or selling them at used bookstores. I could not donate my board games, and there was no local place to sell them.
The intervention happened after two years. My wife, kids, and son-in-law demanded I get rid of my stuff. We started with selling board games on eBay. My son-in-law took pictures and made the online posts after researching prices. A Battlestar Galactica expansion sold for $250. My wife and I drive to the post office nearly every morning. We enjoy the ride together into town and sometimes shop for food afterward. I love this twenty-minute morning outing with my wife. This week, we started selling books. Seeing a used book sell for nearly a hundred dollars is motivation to sell more.
I still have a shelf of books on minimalism—Mari Kondo, Swedish death-cleaning, and Fumio Sasaki’s Goodbye, Things. That label did not exist in college when I dreamed of being a mountain hermit. Eventually, I will sell them. I look forward to taking a trip with the family from the money earned. Last spring, we all visited Disneyland for four days.
I still love books and board games. I can be a collector even with most of my collection sold. I still dream of being a mountain hermit and love reading those thousand-year-old poems. But time with my family is the most precious of all.
Ken. I loved this story. As I read it, I was screaming in my head “Ken, go get them back!”. But I see now, Mari Kondo’s philosophy is working and letting go of things is giving you and your wife special time together.
This was a beautiful reflection Ken. You had me at Gary Snyder. I recently read a collaboration he did with the print artist Tom Killion, Tamalpais Walking (https://www.amazon.com/Tamalpais-Walking-Poetry-History-Prints/dp/159714259X) about their respective encounters with Mt. Tamalpais and its poetic history. I'm trying to make sure that the inspiration translates into actual adventures on the mountain. :)