Dumping Hope

The day inspiration went out with the trash

I should be flayed. Maybe scourged. Drawn and quartered sounds about right. Whatever punishment is deemed suitable undoubtedly is warranted for I’m guilty: I tossed books in a dumpster. Gasp!

I could blame it on the heat. The morning started out overcast and breezy and I took advantage to fell and dismember a tree and put it out for the city to collect. Then sweltering heat arrived, infiltrated my brain and wrecked my judgment.

The used books had been purchased at the town library’s second-hand bookstore. They are cheap, from a quarter to two bucks apiece. Because they are inexpensive, whenever I open one and discover an unappealing writing style, a leaden presentation of facts, or something else off-putting, I have no qualms setting the book aside and reaching for another.

So, I had a heaping bagful of books to donate back to the store—hardcover, paperback, biography, fiction, some read, some sampled, recognized authors and never-heard-of-scribblers. However, when I entered the library, I learned the store was not accepting donated volumes. The space was to be remodeled, so shelves were being thinned to ease the work.

“I should just toss all these?” I asked. The bookstore clerk and I both smiled and shook our heads. Of course not. Just return with them in a couple of months. Yet when I lugged the bag out the door, the day had begun to sizzle. It seemed to fry my judgment. I drove several blocks to a public dumpster and dropped in the full bag.

Shame on me.

I think of William Faulkner, who in remarks in Stockholm in 1953 after being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, spoke of how, when the “last ding-dong of doom” has sounded, man will still be here. “I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal. He has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure… by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of the past.”

All true—and I offloaded a full bag of inspiration and hope and courage into a foul metal garbage receptacle like a sack of carrot peelings and crumpled Wheaties boxes. Words crafted into fungible visions, dumped. Thoughts rendered in poignant passages worthy of re-reading and savoring, trashed. Vicarious adventures and soaring futuristic imaginings smooshed against dirty diapers and spoiled cabbage. All thrown away, none shared.

I will disagree this much with Faulkner, author of The Sound and the Fury: It is the duty of everyone, not just writers, to buck up mankind. We’re in this together, we homo sapiens, writers and readers, poets and politicians, all of us in constant search of verities if not eternal truths. We need each other, our best thoughts, our purest hopes, our grandest words. Because alone, we’ll all end up in the dumpster.