Rebuilding Me

Ketsana, that great bitch, destroyed the Michael Cabauatan Library main collection which is, sans the vanity title, basically 98% of the books which I owned that I gave a crap about. Everything from all my college text books to my philosophy-theology collection, the books of my favorite fiction authors (Kundera, Murakami, Kafka, Amis, and Gaiman) and my complete collection of the written works of David Sedaris. I am of course devastated. That is tens of thousands of pesos in bound investments down the drain. That is also most of who I am as a person. These books were what defined me. That's why they were in a separate shelf away from my other books. They in one way or another challenged my understanding of self and reality.�

Anyway, what's gone is gone. I can't look back at their contents to see if I've deviated from their ideals. The reference to who I am is officially gone. For the record, only Foucault and Plato were saved (the Fr. David SJ readings). The beautiful thing about life and humanity though, is that the definition still exists in me, and that I am an ever changing individual. I may not be able to go back to Marcel, Hobbes, Vatican II, or any of the other lost books to revisit their impact on my psyche, but I guess the best thing to do is move forward. I can either look for the lost books (again) which are hard to find in bookstores in my little slice of 3rd world metropolis, or I can rebuild by reading new books and see if they affect my self and my reality.�

So: step 1. I bought Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, and Cohen's Humanistic Psychology. That's one lost book and one new book. Let's see where I go from there...