The Perils of Organization

Periodically I will get an organizational bug and think about sorting my books again. We had them all arranged back in Dayton, separated into fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. When we got here, they went on the shelves with no thought towards ordering, only towards a house free of boxes. Little by little, some order has crept in, sort of a reverse entropy. First to get sorted was the music books — not completely ordered yet, but at least all the books by or about Cage and Bach are together on the same shelf. So today I tried separating fiction from non-fiction. It went all right for a little while, but then I found a shelf whose connections were so delicate, so inimitable, and so serendipitous that I immediately returned to my computer, preferring to idle away time in games and other trivial pursuits rather than question the wisdom of the universe. National Book Award winning travel writer Peter Hessler, philosopher Theodor Adorno, Nobel Prize winning novelist Kenzaburo Oe, and the indescribable William Burroughs shall continue their cohabitation. At least until next time…