This morning I shipped out three boxes of Russian books: a 10-volume set of Belinskii, four volumes of Pisarev, and eight of Goncharov. Two of them went to Slavists and one to the neighbor of someone from my graduate program at Columbia, someone who remembers seeing the same set of books in his grandmother's apartment back in Russia. I am very happy to have found good homes for them.
This has been prompted by a fresh influx of books from New York following the passing of Mary's mom and her brother George. Mary had stored some of her mom's books at her brother's house, but when it became time to empty that house, the books migrated here.
In general it is getting to be time for us to be paring down our things lest they overcome us. I remember how horrific it was for Rob to have to clean out the house in Larchmont a few years back when Mary Lee moved to the Osborne.
Right now it falls to me to pare, because it is far from the time for Mary to be getting rid of mementos of her home and family up north. Many of the books I am making room for will never get read by anyone in our house, which is fine. That's the fate of many of my own books, including the ones I shipped today. Their main function was to sit on my shelf and remind me of an earlier time in my life. I've got enough such things, Mary needs a little more space just now.
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