year-end
by the numbers?
Of the 68 or more books I read this year, how many were poetry collections and how many were fiction? How many were memoir? How many were political philosophy? How many were new and how many were very, very old?
I could do the math and tell you, but also: How many of these books soothed something in me that was a little raw and ragged, and how many woke up something that had been asleep too long?
What would be the best pie graph of these books, to quantify the degree of understanding and joy their pages brought me? What colours would its pieces require to convey how much delight I’d found—or sustenance, or challenge—in the rough or smooth texture of their pages beneath my thumbs?
Further: how many hours did I spend reading aloud to children this year? If I read ten minutes to P most nights, that’s nearly 3,650 minutes, or nearly 60 hours. How much love is held in 60 hours of a mother’s narrating voice?
How many songs made me dance in the kitchen when nobody was around to see? How many hours did I spend tapping the car’s steering wheel, alive to sound? How many times did I hold M’s hand and dance until we laughed all the breath out of our lungs and then filled them up again?
How many breaths did I take?
How often was I breathless in the best and worst of ways?
How many questions did I ask people I love, or people I do not particularly love, with love? And how often did I stop to listen to the answer?
How many questions did other people ask of me? How many of these questions opened my heart like a watercolour tin?
How many things did I make? How many meals? How many crocheted scarves, how many knee patches, how many little drawings in the corner of my page, how many poems? How many squares did I cut out of cloth and stitch, and how many stitches did I take through the three layers of a sandwiched quilt, the thimble snug against my thumb?
How many seconds, minutes, hours did I hug J? How many kisses? If we managed a 20-second hug each day, that would be 7,300 seconds of hugging, or 121.67 minutes, just over two hours. How does one quantify the softening of a 20-second hug, the muscle-unclenching easeful here-ness?
How many messages did I send to friends that provoked an out-loud laugh? How many cumulative decibels of laughter did I shout? How many millileters—fluid ounces? pints?—of tears? How many minutes did I spend worrying about something that never came to pass? How many hours did I scroll on an impassive screen? How many inches—feet?—of candle wick did we burn in beeswax, our faces bathed in its gold? How many people sat around our table, sat around the front room, talking true? For how many heart-hours? How many glasses of water did I fill this year? How many kettles did I boil? How many spoons of honey did I stir into a mug?
How often did I feel myself too busy to take note? How often did I take notes? How often did I mail a note, or sing one?
Some excellent and thought provoking questions. Thank you!
Thank you for refusing to be seduced by 'numbers' and shrinking the qualitative to mere quantity. Every thing that 'counts' can not be counted. Counting books insults the dimensional experience of reading. And re-reading. Analogously, when someone shows me a picture on their phone of a sunset, I appreciate their rapture and I thank them. While I silently brood: really, please don't insult the phenomena, just attend to it, just experience it.