How The Beach Boys Convinced Me To Stop Cleaning My Apartment
The value of having a little dust on your bookshelf
You make a habit of dusting your apartment every other Sunday. The last place you dust is your bookshelf, one of those IKEA black-brown stock models that’s meant to screw into the wall, but which you instead leaned lackadaisically backward a few centimeters. You’re more comfortable in a world where you can be threatened with death by toppling literature.
Though you might survive such an accident, it would surely start you sneezing. Your bookshelf, even after two weeks, is covered in dust. This feels like a middle finger from a higher power to your post-grad office life.
Seeing your bookshelf covered in loose pieces of dead skin is a cruel reminder of your shortcomings. You don’t read enough anymore. You can’t, or won’t, find the time to sit with a good book now that you concern yourself with a Real Adult Job.
But you’re making an effort. One of your iPhone Safari bookmarks is an article about how to read more books every week. That’s what adulthood is: re-learning how to read.
You read plenty of industry books, jotting down everything that you might find useful once you jump ship and leave the nine-to-five to lead your own startup of digital nomads. You’ll use the knowledge from all those books, about how to network or how to come up with ideas for a company, when you’re out roaming the world and your bookshelf is at home collecting dust.
You’ve even considered buying a Kindle to keep all your business books portable when you travel. Books are heavy.
I’m not going to flog you for that. I’ll give you the whip and you can flog yourself.
The dust on your bookshelf is about more than just your inability to get through “enough” books. It stands for all the time you spend dead-brained, scanning Instagram and Facebook for the hundredth time. Dust on your bookshelf is a symptom of your shifted priorities, not necessarily shifted for the better.
A book, a good book, a book worth dusting off, is a challenge. It’s a full workout for your mind and soul. A good book foam rolls your grey matter before it really gets down to business, and it greets you with a hot bath at the end (a great bath ends with an ice bath).
But it requires patience. For a book to have its effect, you must be patient and willing to absorb all it has to give you. You must be willing to wrestle with your own inner conflict and doubt. In a book, you can’t close a tab and go to Snapchat. You can only close the book and leave it. Then nobody wins.
You can’t afford to be distracted reading a book. There’s no escape. When you glance at the last few paragraphs only to realize you’ve forgotten them, your only choice is to put your tail between your legs and try again. There’s no way to go on without that information.
Modern living has dulled our need to internalize or remember. There’s always another blog post, and you can always come back later to the one you missed. But this adds up. There’s too much on the internet to read. You’ll never read it all. But you try.
The internet doesn’t collect dust. The internet is always shiny and glowing in your preferred brightness setting. Your brain learns to stay permanently in the mode of expecting something new. Your patience erodes. Your tolerance for the present disappears, digested by the persistent call of the future.
“Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by the Beach Boys is the saddest song I’ve ever heard. What a horrific idea:
Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older
Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long
Wouldn’t have to wait so long for what? Happiness? Death? Dementia? Student loan debt?
The song is built on a fallacy that plagues us: the future is always better than the present. “The future” does not exist. When we refer to the future, we mean our own imagination. Take this line in the song:
We could be married
And then we’d be happy.
Talk about a leap of faith.
But if we aren’t satisfied with the present, if we are afraid of our doubts and insecurities and hide from them in our own imagination or on the internet, we get sucked into the vortex of an illusory “future”. Our present selves suffer, and our bookshelves collect dust.
You know it seems the more we talk about it
It only makes it worse to live without it
But let’s talk about it.
News flash, Brian Wilson: the future never arrives. We always live in the present.
Maybe that’s why you dust every few weeks. You need to keep your bookshelf tidy for that moment in the future when you’re ready to read Infinite Jest or The Bell Jar or The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes. Dusting your bookshelf is a convenient way to look into the future with bright eyes and embrace the possibility of tomorrow the old-fashioned way.
Of course, a dusty bookshelf looks the other way, too. A dusty bookshelf is a haven of nostalgia. The pain from an old wound, as Don Draper reminds us.
A dusty bookshelf, especially now, is a fond marker of what was, without losing sight of what still could be. Dusty covers still hold fresh pages, pages patiently waiting to be read patiently.
Books represent something fundamental about the human condition. That’s what I would say if this were a college application. But books say a lot about us, as individuals and as a society. Borders going out of business was an American tragedy. Our bookshelves grow dustier every day. You may even forget to dust yours altogether.
But in this day and age, the “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”, blinders on, forward-looking, present-ignoring day and age in which we live, a dusty bookshelf isn’t such a bad thing. It’s a reminder of what was, and of what still could be.
And when it’s been six weeks since you last dusted, and you look up from Instagram and catch a glimpse of your dusty bookshelf, maybe that will be the moment you pick up Infinite Jest.
There you go again. Living in your imagination.
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