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So a while ago one of the older neighbours in the apartment building (whose husband passed away living in my current house, but that’s another story) became confused enough to be brought to the old people's home, which was an adventure in itself, including an unexpected return. Today, her house was stripped. Among others, about twenty boxes of books were thrown onto the street.
When I passed by on the way to the supermarket I looked through them, as did two other people. I found that there was a lot of French stuff (did she study French?), as well as some things that make me suspect she was raised a protestant — something very seventy-ish about God’s will with Marxism or something.
I snagged a Dictionnaire d'ancien français because why the hell not, Robin Lane Fox’s book about the Bible, something I thought was an OED but turned out to be an English-Hindi dictionary, a French book about 13th century French buildings that makes a nice gift for someone I know, and a late-Roman fusion saint’s life set to rhyme in 11th-century French, then translated and prosified into modern Dutch to keep the manuscript tradition nice and complex.
Then I went to do my shopping, a bit sad about all those books being left on the street, but I’m not going to take in twenty boxes into my house when I’m very certain I’ll never read 98% of them.
When I returned half an hour later there were about ten people, all of them in their late twenties and early thirties, going through the boxes. I can’t swear to it, but I got the feeling they knew each other or were part of a group or something. One of them staggered away with two big heavy bags of books, and you don’t just happen to pass twenty boxes of books while having two big bags with you, right?
Books aren’t dead. They’re just sleeping.
