Booking a Fight: Why Keep Dictionaries?

A BOOK FIGHT: WHY KEEP DICTIONARIES?

True story. Marieta and I got into a fight last night. Nothing serious. Just one of those arguments over stupid stuff.

Guess who won. Guess who lost.

The subject of our argument was BOOKS. More like shelves of books.

Without warning, Marieta started “cleaning” the bookcase. That meant going through all the books, and picking out the books we will never open again and have no practical use. She wants to donate those books to a charity store or simply dump them at the curb as trash.

I consider this BLASPHEMY.

Maybe it’s because I’m a writer, but books are like trophies to me. Once I’ve read a book, it goes into the bookcase. Like a prize. An accomplishment. Sure, I’ll probably not open it again. Ever. But I like the feeling of having books around. It’s a security blanket, and I’m Linus from Peanuts. And besides, a bookshelf looks much better than a blank wall covered by faux art or another piece of worthless furniture. Books have character. They live.

Admittedly, I have some deeply-rooted personal serious “issues” with books, as in personal trauma. When I moved to Romania in the late 1980s, I shipped all of my books overseas. I didn’t want to put them into storage. This was probably 1,000 books, mostly on politics. College textbooks. Signed books by famous authors who spoke when I was attending the university. They were a part of me. An extension of who I was. While in Romania, I even acquired more books, including the master works of Nicolae Ceausescu in leather bound volumes, basically the entire collection of every speech or official declaration by Ceausescu from 1968-1989 (probably 50-60 volumes in all–in Romanian language). These were books NO ONE would ever read. They were both priceless, and worthless. But they were extraordinarily rare keepsakes. All the major 20th century communist leaders had these master political manifestos done, in leather-bound volumes, from Lenin to Castro. Almost like Bibles. If you can even find these collections now, they mostly gather dust in the basements of university libraries, if they haven’t been destroyed. I had one and it was all mine.

Anyway, when I moved back to the States, all my books, more than a thousand, were lost in transit. Every one of them. Gone. I was crushed. I had to start my book collection from scratch, but could never replace what was lost.  It was like my personal Fahrenheit 451 tragedy.

Over the next 30 years, the bookshelf filled up again. Slowly. It took time.  We had to weed out a few here and there. Now, it’s so full there’s no room for another book. Which brings us to NOW.

Last night, Marieta asked me, “why should we keep the dictionary?” Fair question. Am I ever going to use the “Webster’s Dictionary” again? Sure enough, we have 14 dictionaries and thesaruses. Or is it theasari? Whatever. Marieta has Romanian-English dictionaries. A Romanian-French dictionary. I have a German-English dictionary. You get the idea. Given what’s available on the Internet within seconds at our fingertips, it’s hard to imagine any scenario where any of these books might be used again. Except one.

Marieta: “So, can we get rid of the dictionaries?”

Me: (sweating, desperately trying to come up with an excuse to keep the books) “No, we might use them again.  You never know.” 

Marieta: “Explain to me how you will ever use a Webster’s Dictionary again since you can Google any word?”

Me:  (fishing for anything) “What if an intense burst of radiation from a solar flare storm erupts and bombards the earth?  Wouldn’t that wipe out all of the electronics?”

Marieta:  “If a burst of radiation from a solar flare storm suddenly erupts and bombards the earth, you’re going to have bigger issues than looking up how to spell ‘supersede.”

Me: (silence)

__________

POSTSCRIPT: I always thought it was spelled ‘supercede.” Anyway, a dozen or so dictionaries will soon be available at the local Goodwill store.