This is how we let things go

 So, last week I wrote what turned into a real downer of a post about history and about monstrosity. That isn't where it started. I began that post with the title that I have added to this. It was going to be a post about letting go and moving past things. But then when it turned out that I really wanted to write about terrible things – well, the title seemed less appropriate. I didn't want to imply that we needed to just let go of historical wrongs or national traumas, so I decided to split off the more personal part of things for a separate post. So this post is nominally about Libra as well, but it is about more than that as well.

What I meant to get into was putting away books for what may be the last time. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I avidly reread my favorite books. I have always done this because I like experiencing the narratives fresh. But there comes times when I think that the time I reread something will be the last. Usually this happens when something changes about a book for me. This happens with authors too.

As I was finishing reading Libra this week, I thought that this might be the last time that I pick it up. This doesn't really have anything to do with DeLillo, but about the kind of postmodern metahistorical novel that Libra is. After all, I have reread DeLillo's Underworld three or four times, I have reread his White Noise more times than that, and I think I read Falling Man 6 or 7 times when I was working on one project in graduate school, and again when I taught the book to undergrads. I still might return to some of these, and I already plan to reread Ratner's Star and Zero K fairly soon.

The reason that I bring all of this up is that putting an author, or a book, to bed this time felt different. As I was reading this novel, I didn't get as excited by it as I had in the past. At the time I thought that it was a piece of my own scholarly past that I was giving up. I thought that maybe I was just losing interest in these kinds of books. But then, when I sat down to write about it I realized that I was wrong. The books still do what they always did, I just need to rediscover that part of myself that engages with them. Libra, like a lot of DeLillo's work, can be plodding. This isn't a complaint, this is an observation. He is purposeful in this kind of thing. I thought that the post was going to be about letting go parts of our lives that are past. But now that I think about this, maybe there is still more underneath it. Like the trauma that I wrote about in my last post, maybe these parts of our lives are here for keeps. It is less a matter of letting go of something because it is no longer a part of our lives, but of letting it sink a little deeper until it needs to come back up.