The Weight of Books

I am in the process of getting rid of my book collection, and the experience has brought on a more profound sense of loss than I ever expected. I am not simply disposing of things I no longer need. As I remove the books from my shelves, I sometimes feel that I am cutting off pieces of myself.

Not long ago, I wrote about how my world is shrinking: fewer places to go, fewer things to do, fewer miles I can walk. I am even physically shorter. Now I report on another kind of shrinking as I reduce the number of possessions I own. I live in a 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom upstairs apartment in Eugene, and everything I have, except my car, fits inside it.

That was not true when I lived down in Marin County before I retired. In addition to all the things in my apartment, I rented a storage room for stuff I no longer used but was reluctant to discard. One summer, perhaps around 2011, I decided to empty it and lighten my load. I did not finish the project that summer, but I continued working on it during weekends and time off. By the summer of 2014, after many, many trips to Goodwill and the recycling center, the storage room was empty. It was then that I moved back to Eugene, bringing only what would fit into my current apartment.

As I approach my eightieth year, I have come to truly appreciate the wisdom of this undertaking. I now practice downsizing as a lifestyle not a project; I try to dispose of one old item for every new one I bring home. This has worked reasonably well, except when it comes to books. I have been a reader and collector for most of my life, although I do not acquire rare books or valuable first editions. Whenever I wanted to read a book, or was just interested in one, I simply bought it. Eventually, it joined the steadily growing number in my bookcases.

As a preteen and teenager, I read a great deal of science fiction. I spent summer days reading indoors while my mother implored me to go outside and play. Most of those early books have disappeared, but I still own a few paperbacks from high school, including the copy of George Orwell’s 1984 that was assigned reading.

Not all my former collections have survived. During my early days in graduate school, I owned what amounted to a rather ambitious chemistry library, but those books disappeared gradually over many moves. Giving them up was an earlier version of what I am doing now, although I do not remember experiencing quite the same sense of loss.

The books that remained reflect the changing interests and circumstances of my life. They included contemporary novels and biographies; and more books about photography, counseling, psychology, self-help, spirituality, travel, and health; and a collection about Watergate that began with All the President’s Men. My later doctoral work added books on higher education, qualitative research, American Studies, the history and philosophy of science, and epistemology.

Most of the physical weight I have lugged from city to city has been books. I have packed them, hauled them up and down stairs, and transported them from one home to another. For years, I accepted this as a routine part of life. Now I am considering a move into a senior residential community, where I will likely live in a one-bedroom apartment or studio. I cannot take all these books with me, and storing them makes little sense. The practical conclusion is clear, but carrying it out has been painful. I now buy books on Kindle, allowing me to continue reading without refilling the shelves I am trying to empty.

During the past few months, I have disposed of perhaps 300 to 400 books, still less than half my collection. I have sold roughly equal numbers to a local used bookstore and a buyer in Illinois. When I visit the bookstore, I take three banker’s boxes, each containing ten to twelve books. One box is about as much as I can safely carry down my stairs, so I take them down and lift them into and out of my car one at a time. I often have to bring some books back home.

The Illinois buyer has an app that lets me scan the barcodes on newer books and learn immediately whether it will accept them. Many older paperbacks have no barcodes, reminding me how long they have been with me. Each shipping box contains only ten to twelve books because I must carry it downstairs and into the FedEx store. Eventually, in the not too distant future, I will have sold everything anyone is willing to buy. I will have to donate them.

I understand the practical reasons for doing this. By disposing of them, it is my hope that at least some will find their way to new readers. Still, none of that eases my sense of loss. Together, these books form a record of my life: what I was curious about, what I studied, what work I did, what illnesses worried me, and what questions I hoped to answer. Some remind me of who I once was; others, of who I was trying to become.

That is why this feels so different from emptying a storage room. When I gave away unused household objects, I felt I was disposing of mere possessions. When I give away my books, I feel I am severing the physical and emotional attachments to different periods of my life.

For now, I plan to keep two shelves of books, about six linear feet. They are signed by their authors, written by people I know, or connected in some way to the core of my being. My will contains instructions for their eventual donation. I am not saving them forever, only admitting that I am not ready to part with them right now.

Perhaps that is all I can do. I can reduce the collection one manageable box at a time, knowing that every book will eventually leave my possession. (Or perhaps more accurately, I will leave them.) For now, the only choice left is which pieces of my life I can let go of today and which I need to keep a little longer.

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Soundtrack Suggestion

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?
It’s based on a novel by a man named Lear
And I need a job
So I wanna be a paperback writer
Paperback writer

(“Paperback Writer” — Beatles)

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My Own Clock

For most of my adult life, I believed I was a morning person. Whether I was working as a chemist in my twenties, attending graduate school in counseling in my thirties, teaching while completing my Ph.D. at Indiana University in my forties, or later serving as a college administrator, I was typically up and at ’em by 5:30 a.m. I assumed that was simply who I was: an early riser, a morning person. It has taken retirement to make me question whether the clock I lived by for so long was ever really my own.

As I look back, I recognize that my sleep pattern was among many rituals which remained remarkably consistent throughout my professional life. For example, I often stopped for breakfast on the way to work before arriving at an office that was mostly empty. How I valued that quiet first hour. The phone wasn’t ringing. Meetings hadn’t begun. No one was standing in the doorway with an urgent question. It gave me time to get oriented before the demands of the day took over.

I recall that during my years at IU, associate instructors could request the sections we wanted to teach. I always chose the 8:00 a.m. classes. Most of my graduate-student peers preferred something later, and undergraduates weren’t especially enthusiastic about early mornings either (an obvious understatement). That suited me just fine. I loved beginning the day before campus had fully awakened.

Then there was another idiosyncratic practice of mine. For years, on the left side of my desk, I kept a stack of papers. The issues demanding the most immediate attention were always on top. I continually shuffled them, working my way down as the day allowed. Those near the bottom sometimes waited for days or even weeks. More than once, a problem resolved itself before I ever reached it. (That strategy, in itself, continues to serve as a valuable personal and professional axiom: not every problem requires immediate action, and some require no action at all.) Like my early mornings, that stack became part of the architecture of my days.

Of course, there were occasional outside interruptions to my rhythms. Beginning in the late 1990s, an enlarged prostate led to increasingly problematic sleep. Four or five trips to the bathroom each night became routine. A TURP (the “roto-rooter” prostate surgery) procedure in 2011 helped enormously, but years of interrupted sleep had trained my body to wake repeatedly. Even after this medical issue improved, the habit of frequent awakenings lingered. But throughout it all, I remained an early riser.

Ultimately, retirement had its impact on my lifestyle. While there was no conscious decision to sleep in later, there simply was no longer a reason to get up before dawn. Without really intending it, I began getting up a little later. And then later.

Today I’m usually asleep by 10:00 and awake around 7:30, about two hours more sleep than during most of my working life. At age seventy-nine, I now sleep considerably more than I once did. That surprised me because I’d always heard that older adults need less sleep. Curious, I did a little reading and discovered the research isn’t nearly as settled as the popular wisdom suggests.

While I was at IU, one of my closest friends seemed to function quite well on four or five hours of sleep each night, but I always needed much more. We were both a little skeptical of the other’s sleeping habits. I couldn’t imagine getting by on so little sleep, and he probably thought I was a slacker. Looking back, I guess each of us believed our own rhythms to be the “normal” ones.

What has stayed with me, though, isn’t the research itself or the sleeping habits of others. Rather, different questions altogether poke through. If my body now prefers a schedule so unlike the one I had followed through most of my adult life, what’s changed? Has retirement simply given me permission to sleep more? Or had I spent decades assuming that my work schedule reflected my natural rhythm when, in fact, I had gradually adapted myself to the rhythms of the institutions where I worked?

For more than half a century, my life was organized around the schedules of schools, colleges, and universities. Over time, those rhythms became so familiar that I stopped noticing they belonged to the institutions where I worked. I experienced them as my own. I believed I was someone who naturally woke at 5:30 every morning. Maybe I was. Or maybe I had simply spent decades living by rhythms that were never entirely mine?

Interestingly, although I sleep longer now, I still keep a pile of papers on the left side of my desk. Today’s stack has little to do with budgets, personnel issues, or committee meetings, though. Instead, it contains notes for upcoming doctor appointments, insurance forms, and, at the moment, a draft of my will waiting to be finalized and signed.

I suppose that’s what retirement has given me. Not simply more time, but a different relationship to time. For most of my adult life, my days began because they had to. Today they begin when I’m ready. Whether that means I truly need more sleep or have finally been allowed to get the sleep I’ve always needed, I don’t know. But after all these years, I’m no longer quite so certain that I ever really understood my own clock.

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Soundtrack Suggestion

Time is on my side, yes it is
Time is on my side, yes it is

Now you all were saying that you want to be free
But you’ll come runnin’ back (I said you would baby)
You’ll come runnin’ back (like I told you so many times before)
You’ll come runnin’ back to me, yeah

Time is on my side, yes it is
Time is on my side, yes it is

(“Time Is On My Side” — Rolling Stones)

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The Observer is Always in the Story

On Memoir, Memory, and the Limits of Objectivity

Not long ago, I reviewed Lauren Kessler’s Everything Changes Everything, her memoir of walking the Camino Francés, the ancient 500-mile pilgrimage that begins in the south of France, crosses northern Spain, and concludes at Santiago de Compostela. Kessler undertook the journey after losing both her husband and her daughter within the span of eight months. My review was later published in the Eugene Weekly (still in existence after 44 years as an actual print newspaper!).

Now, about four months after the book’s publication, Kessler has posted an essay on her Substack titled “The Facts of Memory.” In it, she reflects on the challenges of writing a memoir, a genre that differs from the nonfiction books that established her reputation. As a journalist and nonfiction writer, she has spent her career pursuing facts, verifying accounts, and trying to get the story right. Memoir, however, asks something different of a writer.

The essay explores the uneasy relationship between memory and accuracy. Kessler describes the steps she took to check her recollections against documents, conversations, and other sources, while also acknowledging the unavoidable role of memory in shaping any personal narrative. Reading it, I was struck by her wrestling with questions that have occupied researchers, historians, and writers for a very long time. She invited readers to respond, and I found myself wanting to join the conversation. Here is what I wrote…

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Hi Lauren,

This essay resonated with me, though perhaps not in exactly the way you intended.

My academic training was in qualitative and interpretive research. For my doctoral dissertation, I spent several years studying the social world of a college fraternity, conducting interviews, reviewing documents, attending events, and attempting to understand how members made meaning of their experiences. Early in that work, I abandoned the idea that I could somehow stand outside the story as a detached observer. I brought my own history, assumptions, and experiences to the project, and the best I could do was acknowledge them and make them visible to readers.

Because of that background, I really loved reading this discussion of memoir and nonfiction. We both seem to agree that all accounts of human experience are filtered through the observer. Where you see a tension between memoir and nonfiction, though, I tend to see a continuum. Even the most conscientious reporter or researcher makes choices about what to notice, what to include, what to emphasize, and what meaning to draw from the material. Those choices are never entirely objective.

In fact, one of the things I noted in my review of Everything Changes Everything was that I experienced it not only as a memoir but almost as a form of ethnography. You were documenting a journey, certainly, but you were also observing and interpreting a social and emotional world. The subject happened to be grief rather than a culture or community, but the process, and result, felt surprisingly familiar.

Where I think your essay raises an important point is in distinguishing between subjectivity and memory. Subjectivity does not trouble me very much. Memory, well, is an entirely more complicated matter. Human beings reconstruct the past rather than retrieve it intact, and I understand why that creates discomfort for anyone whose professional life has been grounded in nonfiction reporting.

Still, as a reader, what I ultimately trusted in your book was not the impossibility of perfect recall but the honesty and integrity of the effort. Without even much caring, I imagined that you were doing exactly what you describe in your author’s note: consulting documents, checking memories, talking with others, and rendering events as faithfully as possible.

Perhaps that is why I was struck by this essay as sounding almost apologetic. To me, the power of your memoir lies not in overcoming subjectivity but in embracing it. The book succeeds because it offers a deeply observed and thoughtfully interpreted account of lived experience. I don’t see that as a weakness of memoir. I see it as one of its greatest strengths.

Thanks for giving us all something to think about!

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LCC Board of Education Testimony — June 3, 2026

Here are my remarks made before the Lane Community College Board of Education on June 3, 2026

Chair Folnagy, members of the Board, President Bulger, President Olson: good evening. My name is Jim Arnold and you now know me as a member of the Budget Committee. Thank you, Trustee Rust, for your nomination and your support.

I sent you all an email about this earlier today, so you may be aware that I published a Guest Column in the Lookout inspired by our recent Budget Committee deliberations. Specifically, the catalyst was last week’s discussion about tuition and whether or not to revisit an earlier Board decision.

I wrote the article for a number of reasons. Partly, I wanted to provide some historical context. Many Oregonians, especially younger ones, have little or no awareness of Measure 5 or the profound effect it has had on the funding of public education. Many of the budget pressures we discuss today did not just suddenly appear. They are connected to decisions that were made decades ago.

And I wanted to step back and look at another large issue, for I believe that discussions about tuition are never really just about percentages. Beneath them is a more fundamental question about who benefits from higher education and who should bear the costs.

But also let me mention something else that stayed with me after last Wednesday’s meeting, which was not so much the outcome as the process.

Students came forward and spoke about the impact tuition has had on their lives. Committee members asked questions. Different viewpoints were expressed. People disagreed. Then the committee voted.

Now, that may not sound all that remarkable, but I think it is worth acknowledging. Public institutions are supposed to create space for such conversations. The process does not guarantee agreement, but it does give us an opportunity to surface often unspoken assumptions.

Having spent much of my life in higher education, I can remember a time when the public discussion was framed somewhat differently than it is today. Back in my early days, students certainly benefited from earning degrees and improving their career opportunities, but there was a widespread understanding that society benefited as well.

Over time, as we all know, more and more of the cost of instruction has shifted to students and their families. That shift did not originate at Lane Community College nor with this Board.

Understanding how we arrived here may not solve our budget challenges, but it can help us have a more informed conversation about them.

Thank you.

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Measure 5’s Long Shadow

I was recently appointed to the Lane Community College Budget Committee by the Board of Trustees, though late enough in the year that I only participated in the final three meetings. As far as entries into an established group go, mine was a little clunky. During my first meeting, no one acknowledged the new member in the room and, during the roll call vote, my name was omitted entirely.

Still … three meetings were enough time for me to notice a larger story hiding underneath the spreadsheets.

For those unfamiliar with the process, Oregon community college budget committees are composed of elected Board members plus an equal number of other citizens from the district, appointed by the Board. Their charge is to review the proposed budget, hear public comment, examine the assumptions behind the numbers, and ultimately recommend a budget to the Board for final approval.

This year’s discussions were unusually prolonged and, while mostly civil, occasionally bordered on contentious; there were some close votes. Lane’s proposed FY27 budget comes on the heels of mid-year class cancellations, a mitigation plan involving program closures, and broader concerns about the institution’s long-term financial condition. One recurring issue involved tuition.

Earlier in this academic year, the Board had approved a tuition increase of just 1.2%, considerably below the current rate of inflation. Then, during the final night of deliberations on May 27, Trustee Zach Mulholland proposed revisiting that earlier decision and raising the increase to 2.1% in order to help offset anticipated future shortfalls. I seconded the motion, not because I had fully embraced the proposal, but because I believed the issue deserved public discussion.

The motion failed overwhelmingly, and in the end I voted against it myself.

But what stayed with me afterward was not the outcome of the debate. It was the realization that an important part of the conversation had gone largely unspoken, and that I had failed to voice it myself. We discussed tuition levels, budget pressures, and projected shortfalls, but almost entirely in the language of present-day necessity, with little acknowledgment that Oregon’s higher education funding problems have been shaped by political and economic choices stretching back decades.

To understand why tuition debates at Oregon colleges now carry such weight, we have to go back to Ballot Measure 5.

Passed by voters in 1990, Measure 5 dramatically limited property taxes in Oregon. In many respects it mirrored California’s Proposition 13, reflecting the anti-tax politics that swept through much of the West during the late 1970s and 80s. Supporters argued that homeowners, including retirees on fixed incomes, needed protection from rapidly rising property taxes. That concern was understandable enough, but the long-term consequences for public education proved to be immense.

Before Measure 5, local property taxes played a major role in supporting schools and community colleges. Once those revenues were capped, the state assumed far greater responsibility for financing K-12 education. The difficulty was that state revenues were never really sufficient to fully support both K-12 and higher education at previous levels. Over time, political pressure understandably favored protecting primary and secondary education as much as possible, while colleges and universities were increasingly expected to generate their revenue from other sources. That meant: student tuition hikes.

The shift happened gradually enough that people barely noticed it occurring. One tuition increase did not fundamentally change the system. Neither did the next one. But year after year, decade after decade, the cumulative effect has been truly profound. Public higher education has slowly evolved from something funded primarily by the broader public into something increasingly financed by students themselves.

When I first entered higher education, way too many years ago now, the dominant philosophy was that colleges served a broad public purpose. An educated population strengthened communities, employers, civic institutions, and democracy itself. Students obviously benefited personally from earning degrees and improving their employment opportunities, but society benefited as well. The costs, therefore, were understood as something to be shared collectively.

Over time, however, the dominant cultural and philosophical view of higher education shifted. College increasingly came to be framed less as a public investment and more as a private consumer commodity. If students would eventually earn more money because of their education, then they should bear most of the financial responsibility for obtaining it.

At one level, this argument has a certain logic to it. Students absolutely do reap the benefits from their higher education. But the argument conveniently overlooks the larger public decisions that constrained educational funding in the first place. We, and I mean we taxpayers and voters, collectively shrunk the revenue source that once supported public colleges and universities, then gradually shifted more of the resulting burden onto students and their families.

That reality sat quietly underneath the Budget Committee discussions at Lane, even though no one acknowledged this out loud.

During public comment time, students did argue passionately against tuition increases, and understandably so. Many are already balancing work, rent, food insecurity, housing insecurity, childcare, transportation costs, and/or debt. Even relatively modest tuition increases can feel overwhelming when they are already living close to the financial edge. At the same time, the institution itself faces legitimate fiscal pressures involving bargaining agreements, deferred maintenance, enrollment shifts, program sustainability, and a looming demographic cliff. The math driving these discussions is real.

But arithmetic alone does not explain why Oregon students now shoulder so much of the cost of public higher education. That outcome reflects a more profound, and largely-unspoken decision about who benefits from higher education and who should pay for it.

For decades now, Oregon has largely answered that question by shifting more of the responsibility onto students themselves. The budget-development process and Board decision-making at Lane did not create this reality. 

In the end, here’s how I see it: tuition debates are never simply about percentages. They are arguments about public priorities, generational obligations, and the extent to which society still views higher education as a shared public good rather than merely a private economic transaction.

These are larger issues than any single Budget Committee can resolve in any single year. But they are questions worth acknowledging explicitly, especially when the bill increasingly arrives in the hands of students.

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Soundtrack Suggestion

Let me tell you how it will be
There’s one for you, nineteen for me
’Cause I’m the taxman
Yeah, I’m the taxman

(“Taxman” — Beatles)

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Update on June 3, 2026:

This essay, in a slightly-edited form, was published as a Guest Column in the Lookout Eugene-Springfield today.

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