Life in objects

I remember the bookshelves we had growing up. They were six-feet-tall and quite wide. The top halves had shelves in them, and I always picture them full of books. The bottom half had drawers, full of more books. They were finished in a dark wood veneer that over the years had accumulated many scuffs and bruises. Woodworm had got to them, too; I remember brushing off frass and cleaning them whenever we spotted the signs.

More books would come every year. In September, without fail, we would visit the Colombo International Book Fair and return with bags full of them. The bookshelves, although always full, somehow had room for new books every time.

I don’t always look back at childhood memories with fondness, but the ones surrounding books are an exception. There were half-hearted attempts to alphabetise and index my books in various ways over the years, and I may have prepared a spreadsheet with a near-complete list at one point, but I can’t seem to find any photos of my bookshelves. Through multiple house moves they stayed a constant for so many years. I just don’t have any proof of it.

My late-blooming archival tendencies may have sprung from the despair of not having kept things, and records of things, that mattered to me back then. I recall now with great disappointment all I have thrown away over the years. Several memory sticks full of photos from the first digital camera we owned as a family have disappeared without a trace. I couldn’t tell you where all the video cassette tapes from our old camcorder ended up. I know several photo albums exist, in boxes somewhere, gathering dust, deteriorating, but I haven’t the faintest clue how many have been already lost to time. I am angry with myself now for thinking of much of it as clutter.

When I first thought of putting together a timeline of how my desk setup had evolved I was disappointed to find that my photo backups only went back to 2014. When I wanted to create an archive of all the live performances I had attended there was no reliable way of determining the details of events pre-2017. My blog that I started in 2014 was all but lost for a few years, and I remember not caring enough to back it up or preserve it in any way. (A local copy survived on a hard disk somehow, and I’m glad it did). Early examples of my design hobby, which I started back in school more than 15 years ago, have been lost to impulsive silo-quits (primarily Facebook).

I have long underestimated the role objects—both physical and digital—play as anchors for memory. In my quest to hoard nothing I have perhaps ignored the comforting call of nostalgia. I won’t be doing an about-turn (holding on to physical objects purely for sentimental value is a luxury I cannot afford at this point in my life), but a little bit of thoughtful archiving is in order.

The old bookshelves, now in my parents’ house back home in Sri Lanka, still hold my old books. They haven’t crossed oceans with me, but the memories have.