TSUNDOKU!

[‘Tsundoku’: (Japanese: 積ん読) is acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them. It is also used to refer to books ready for reading later when they are on a bookshelf.

The term originated in the Meiji era (1868–1912) as Japanese slang. It combines elements of tsunde-oku (積んでおく, to pile things up ready for later and leave) and dokusho (読書, reading books). As currently written, the word combines the characters for "pile up" (積) and the character for "read" (読). There are suggestions to include the word in the English language and in dictionaries like the Collins Dictionary.

The American author and bibliophile A. Edward Newton commented on a similar state in 1921.]

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The Japanese are amazing, both individually and collectively, for both their unique cultural traditions and heritage, as well as their aesthetic preferences, as I have discovered after many decades of study. Their language (derived from the Chinese ‘Kanji’) is also as unique as their literary traditions are diverse.

Today I discovered (thanks to a mad monk friend of mine, whom we shall call ‘Dan’) that I suffer from an advanced state of Tsundoku, in that my home is rather aptly characterised as a repository for countless arcane and wildly diverse books on just about every possible subject imaginable.

There are stacks upon stacks of books in just about every room of our house, on any conceivable subject, a status that has in past literally brought tears of frustration to the eyes of my long-suffering but profundly unsympathetic wife of many years (she is also from a different culture than my own Irish-German heritage, her family hailing originally from China, making her what I call ‘FBC’, or ‘Foreign-Born Chinese’, as opposed to ‘ABC’, or American-Born Chinese’. Is there much of a difference, you may well ask? Oh, you BETCHA, Red Ryder!). I shall explain, shortly.

This affliction the Japanese call ‘Tsundoku’ has other names in our western milieu, perhaps more commonly by the word ‘Bibliomania’, but also (some would argue) ‘hoarding’, etc., etc., etc. But ‘hoarding’ is defined as the mere aggregation of objects without any particular or specific purpose in mind. By contrast, Tsundoku generally has as its intent the collecting of materials with an intention to read them (in its more common application).

Fortunately, I am not alone in falling into this descriptive category, since I have a close friend (a retired educator) who also suffers from this affliction, perhaps more so than I, even, as he has larger and many more stacks of books on all subjects than do I. Since we speak a common language when it comes to the importance and value of pursuing stored knowledge in the form of printed literature, we both enjoy nothing more than a leisurely peruse of whatever bookstore (new OR used) happens to obstruct our forward path in life, on any given day.

In congruence with this passion, I can think of no better way to begin each day after rising (at 0615) than leisurely getting lost in whatever book my fancy directs me to open out of the many as I slowly favor that single cup of Hawai’ian coffee (Moloka’i-grown Arabica, of course!) that I permit myself each morning. My faithful furry companion (Nala, a 12-year-old Siberian Husky female) takes up her accustomed station on her pad near me and gazes at me with what I can only surmise to be either affection or anticipation of her first ‘treat’ of the day’s many (probably the latter, LoL), as I tackle what I hope are at least several chapters until wifie intrudes with the first items on her daily agenda for me.

My similarly afflicted friend's home is even more full of books than mine and his wife is perhaps just as adamantly opposed to filling up their communal spaces with these incredibly valuable (but pure deadweight type) repositories of stored knowledge, acquired wisdom and reference as my own. But until that moment…sigh!...pure Heaven! [Excellent coffee, great books, a good reading chair and my fur-kid by my side! Does it ever get any better than that, I ask you?]

Think of Tsundoku as it applies to me in terms of the 2nd Amendment of our constitution, if that helps put all of it into a more immediately ‘graspable’, conceptual context. There are some individuals in our admittedly gun-obsessed culture, post-Wild-West society, that collect firearms the way my confrere and I collect books and I readily acknowledge that it may be (or can become) pathological and indeed rapidly spin out of control, in certain extreme cases.

Fortunately for both me and society at large, killing others randomly with heavy, awkward books is quite a bit more difficult to carry out efficiently than simply aiming a lethal, easily concealed and decidedly anti-social, deadly-projectile-spewing device at another person in the course of a heated disagreement with them. Try to imagine (for example) hefting a typical (hardcover) volume of William S. Burrough’s THE NAKED LUNCH (or a similarly chunky Charles Bukowski volume of ETOH-saturated poems) and then deftly pitching it in such a precise and exact trajectory that it connects with the nose of the person you have suddenly chosen as an antagonist and leaves them with a permanently deviated nasal septum!

Ptah! I mean, how many 5PM daily news stories, narrated by bosomy, amply upholstered and seemingly always seeming-to-be-just-on-the-verge-of-hysteria young women, (who recite the latest outrages on the news programs to their hoi polloi viewers as if these daily occurrences were on par with a considerably dumbed-down academic lecture on epistemology) that no low-IQ life is complete without access to, relate, say hypothetically, a hostage situation where the perp has threatened to beat his wife to death (and then take his own life) by pelting her (and himself) with hundreds of heavy books? Not many, I’d venture to guess! [Send the SWAT team back to the barn, if he does!]

At any rate, and to paraphrase a hoary old chestnut of an aphorism: “Whoda thunk that so much encapsulated wisdom and transcribed knowledge could be the cause of so much wanton death and destruction?” Not very likely, eh? But a Glock 9 mm loaded with Hornady Arms’ Critical Defense rounds could certainly do the job beyond anyone’s homicidal expectations (reasoned or unreasoned).

So, one could argue perhaps feebly, wouldn’t you rather be threatened by a man armed with several 'high-caliber', heavy tomes of ancient prosaic or classical Chinese poetic wisdom than be confronted by someone who has a whole closet full of Glocks in varying calibers? I’ve never had a conversation proposing anything like that with wifie, of course, because although I have an Irish temper (Da’s legacy), I also am a cultivated, ‘well-eddicated’ and at least somewhat culturally erudite person who usually manages to check my homicidal urges (and don’t kid yourself…we ALL have them, from time to time) at the virtual door that opens into more humane understanding of maladapted human psychology.

But to get back to my topic here, the matter of my personal bibliomania has been a thorn in the side of my own marital better-half since day-one. Even before I got married and was still living in a marvelously idyllic little 4-room beach cottage at Sunset State Beach (situated on the Central Coast, near Watsonville, and just south of Nirvana-like Santa Cruz), my future-wife-to-be was roped into helping move all the many stacks of books I had squirreled away there to our new, future home-to-be in lovely downtown ‘Suckatomato’ (which is the Podunk, hicktown-flavored and politically dysfunctional capitol of the totally fuc*ked-up State of Confusion, known as Californica, sic).

To her everlasting credit, when a busy cardiac cath lab schedule continually called me away to endless hours of dredging out clogged coronary arteries at the Santa Cruz Heart Institute (note: now defunct, but formerly part of Santa Cruz Community Hospital…also now defunct…and the very first cardiac surgery facility in Santa Cruz County, until forced out of business by nearby and voraciously ‘market-share greedy’ Dominican Santa Cruz Medical Center…thanks a heap, Sister Julie!), wifie and her “baby-sister” waded into all those stacks fortified with with a valiant and martial determination that would have done Genghis Khan credit, and moved at least a thousand volumes of hardcover books (my personal library was so very tiny, back then!) all the way from Sant Cruz to our domicile in beautiful but odoriferously aromatic Suckatomato-by-the-Sewage-Farm!

Incidentally, although that aspect of the relocation seems to have gone off smoothly enough, I have never heard the end of that particular opening round in our on-going war over ‘too many books!’ (perhaps unsurprisingly, since the Chinese have memories that are reputed to rival those of their indigenous Elephas maximus indicus quadrupeds). In actual fact, the recorded history of that particular battle (with my book transport) has been formally entered as just another legal brief into the chronicles of wifie’s aesthetic case against the bibliomanic defendant on trial, here. Sigh!

At this point, I should perhaps point out to the jury (of readers or peers, if you will) that the principal reason why we have so many stacks of books clogging the living spaces of our home is that wifie, in her infinite wisdom, has declared the house to be a ‘bookcase-free’ zone, subject to monitoring scrutiny (if need be) by the United Nations High Commission on Tsundoku Proliferation.

That is, she will not, under penalty of God-knows-what fiendish ancient Chinese torture practices (such as ‘death by a thousand snarky remarks’…a particular favorite…or sharpened book-markers driven under fingernail beds…or, well you get the idea), permit any intrusion of the designated ‘no book case’ area with anything that half-way resembles a device intended to hold or contain books in any sort of sane order!

Now (as I pause to confer here with the aesthetic legal counselor that is the other half of my Gemini self), practically anyone knows that books and bookcases go together as perfectly as a penis and a vagina…they just seem to be intended to naturally compliment each other in The Supreme Being’s perfect Universal Order of All Things Human. Thus, one could infer, that repudiation of the legitimacy of bookcases constitutes something on the order of sheer illogical lunacy, at the very least, or even bibliographic pornography (if one is willing to stretch a point, yer honner)!

There is, after all, a very, very, VERY compelling reason why public libraries, while absolutely chock full of deliciously flavored books, are also equally full of lovely, state-of-the-art, aesthetically perfected (and probably ghastly expensive, as well) bookcases! Yes! Can you even imagine entering a library and trying to find a reference book on just about anything without the mandatory adjunctive aid of bookcases (or the Dewey Decimal System, despite the fact that it gets little actual use these days)! The mere thought of trying to navigate one’s way around piles and stacks of jumbled-up books is enough to drive any sane, eddicated appreciateur of wisdom absolutely stark raving insane!

Thus, we have, at our home, what constitutes a radically stalemated stand-off characterised by a perpetual state of mutual confusion, irritation, distrust and barely concealed bibliographic-centered antipathies. Think ‘Mexican stand-off’ if that helps put it into a politically incorrect frame of reference (even though you’d really have to substitute ‘Chinese’ for Mexican, I guess, to be more accurate).

Now wifie’s main argument (or at least the one I constantly suffer minor virtual head-aches from, at any rate) is that bookcases are book-magnets. No sooner has a bookcase appeared than it magically begins filling itself up! I’ve never asked wifie whether she TRULY believes that books appear on vacant shelves entirely by virtue of their own mystical qualities or whether there may actually be a human element in that equation (truthfully, I strongly suspect the former), although there’s no arguing the basic assumption extant there: one way or another, books DO end up on empty shelves.

Her assumption (quite tenuous and never yet proven in a court of ‘book law’) is that empty book shelves invite the acquisition of NEW volumes, or books that are not already scattered about in disordered mayhem. And so, the stale-mate continues…we continue to suffer collisions at night with stacks of books while sleep-walking around the house and no possible ‘order’ can visit itself upon us to otherwise improve our mobile somnambulant safety. AND…more importantly…I continue to have one hell of a time trying to find a relevant volume of knowledge/information when I am suddenly in need of it! Friends, that’s akin to not being able to find the Viagra or the Cialis when nature fails to endows a senior male at moments when a stiffie seems FAR more important than the world’s entire accumulation of knowledge (excepting, perhaps, the ‘Joy of Sex 2020’ or the ‘Little Golden Book of a Thousand Tantric Variations on Lordotic Sexual Technique’).

You see, I actually hate libraries. But let me qualify that a bit. I hate formal libraries of the public variety…especially now, at a time like the present, when SARS-CoV-2 is making just about any sort of sharing with others difficult, if not totally impossible. I’ve never enjoyed poking around in Dewey card-files, or squeezing past others at the magazine racks, or sitting at communal tables where the hot young, foxy numbers all think I’m trying to perve on them simply because I’m an ‘older’ guy (chalk that up to incipient narcissism that is probably a worse plague today among the young females than any threat of biological mortality) and because there’s no quieter nook in which to sit. For me, as John W. Aldridge astutely pointed out in his astoundingly prescient 1969 book, ‘The Country of the Young’, there is no great self-identifying value to be found in peer herd behavior that can’t be attained through quality ‘time apart’ from one’s own herd. Which is why I have always found such wonderfully bracing virtues of actualization in what Aldridge described as ‘a sense of social apartness’.

I’ve always preferred the reflective benefits of ‘apartness’ and found them to be greatly conducive conduits through which to gain greater understanding of the more ascendant concerns in our never simple human affairs. Part of this, at least for me, has been in keeping my personal ‘stash’ of knowledge always at hand, perpetually on tap as part of a personally selected repository of knowledge (in the form of books). Oh, I avail the internet and seek illuminating information on the web just like everyone else these days, but there something so much more, almost indescribably soul-satisfying about having all these transcriptional ‘knowledge slaves’ right there when I need them, to help illuminate my passage through whatever gnarly passage of inquiry I find myself encumbered with when my own ‘on board’ computer’s memory cells are either hyper-saturated or so overloaded that I need to slow the pace of data retrieval & acquisition to a more leisurely, human pace.

Reference again the value of ‘apartness’ that even back in 1969 Aldridge singled out and focused on, in relationship to the youthful communal adherence to conventional peerdom that nourishes the state of youthful uncertainty and insecurity extant in those younger than 35 years. It is further somewhat incredible to me that, given that in 1969 such things as the internet, ‘smartphones’ and…shudder…’social media’, were not even glimmers on the social vanguard’s foreseeable horizon, back then.

For all these reasons and doubtless many more I have failed to either quantify, enumerate or cite, having a dedicated personal library is a wonderful luxury indeed, by my reckoning and besides…there’s just something procrioceptively satisfying about hefting the physical bulk of a book in one’s hand!

Wifie, in contrast to this, has a far more ‘pragmatic’ outlook on printed information. She feels that you read a book and when it is finished you dispose of it…before acquiring another. Of course, the fallacy implicit therein is easy enough to determine: the human mind is today so utterly overwhelmed by a surfeit of ‘information’ that even if we could remember everything of relevance (like some quantum super-computer with exponentially infinite memory), we wouldn’t have time enough to even begin to tentatively file it away in retrievable form. And additionally, for my purposes, there’s no substitute like having that information (suitably annotated in the margins, as required) right there in a known spot, to pull out for whatever citation is in its cerebral ‘trimester’ of problem-specific analysis, bearing on one’s subject!

She has very few books of her own, accordingly, despite a fairly healthy reading appetite. But this accords perfectly with her personal Unified Field Theory on where books fit into one’s needs and desires. It is, admirably I suppose, a very ZEN asset, since it helps maintain a suitably Japanese sense of Shibumi (a simple, unobtrusive aesthetic of simple beauty), not to mention keep clutter down.

And so there we are (my Tsundoku buddy and I), outcasts in our own homes, where the only real concern of any potentially catastrophic physical moment probably relates to the floor-loading factor in rooms containing a surfeit of books, as it pertains to piles of books stacked along walls that probably have very specific ‘do not exceed’ floor-board weight limits (also known in aviation circles as ‘proceed beyond this point at your peril’ limitations). We can expect absolutely no sympathy or even basic understanding from our wifely units in this complex area of marital differences of opinion, nor can we proceed in any sort of orderly, soul-satisfying manner beyond the fortifications of the virtual Berlin-Wall that separates the two conceptional ‘takes’ cited here on what constitutes bookish reality under these conflicting conditions!

Of course, ask any wife what she regards as the most sacrosanct shared value in life with any partner (of the marital persuasion) and she will, with the predictable speed of a Starship Enterprise Dilithium Crystal powered Warp Drive, fling the word ‘TRUST’ in your face so fast and with so much inertial force that you will momentarily feel as if you’ve been squeezed through a Black Hole, ass-end first (after being reduced to molecular quantum dust first and then being reconstituted in corporeal substance after the journey)!

Naturally, ‘Trust’ is not an accepted (or even ‘standardised’) entry in the ‘GUY HANDBOOK’, I hasten to state, since small deceits, clever dodges, fast feint maneuvers and generally dodgy behavior are all ‘fall-back’ positions that just about every guy employs to stand a reasonable chance of dealing even half-way effectively with the ‘trust’ issue! And this most regrettably serves to simply reinforce ‘her’ (or ‘his’, I guess one needs to add, these LGTBQ days) inherent feeling that no matter WHAT the opposite number in one’s marital relationship is up to, it somehow embodies untrustworthiness and deceit! [The fact that this fact is absolutely ‘spot-on’ and 100% accurate must here be put aside, for the sake of my presented arguments…OK?]

So, there you are, my friends. It is, all previous considerations aside for the moment, gratifying that I, with a supranormal vocabulary (much along the lines of those detailed by that famous San Francisco poet Jack Spicer) that has also gotten me in trouble most of my life, have picked up an entirely new word to add to my verbal armamentarium. Thanks to both my previously alluded to ‘mad monk’ friend and my fellow victim of Tsundoku (who is a friend of both of us).

And yes, ‘Tsundoku’ can cause some confusion on the part of those who enjoy the unique form of puzzle-solving that ‘SUDOKU’ entails (as it did me also, at first). When I first heard the word Tsundoku I predictably scoffed at what seemed to me to be either a mispronunciation of that familiar word or an incorrectly transcribed transliteration of same. Surprise, surprise, when I found that to my amazement it was as unique and startlingly different as that mysterious stellar object that rocketed through our solar system recently (the one that Canadian astrophysicist and astronomer Robert Weryk feels may just have been some sort of interstellar alien spacecraft, as he explained in a recent New Yorker Magazine article!), near the speed of light.

In closing, I will resist the urge to resort to what so many (most uncleverly) do these days, in quoting some sort of ‘proof’ cited by de Toqueville in his astounding 1835 work, ‘Democracy in America’ to bolster one’s arguments, but I shall permit myself a quote by good old Willie Shakespeare’s character Hamlet (no, not the little piggy-character in Mendelsohn’s ‘Mid-Summer Night’s Dream’) when he uttered those profound words that go “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of your philosophy, Horatio!”

[And a great many of them to also be found, alas alack, in the female of our species, sad to say!...]

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PS: There is no real ‘Guy Handbook’ to be had on Amazon, sad to say, but there is one titled ‘The Real Man’s Handbook’. Being unfamiliar with it, I can only inform you all of this, since I have not checked it out myself!