Here's the problem.

I've collected these books over years and years.

Some of them date back to my childhood, like all the Little House of the Prairie books. And some, like Louisa May Alcott's A Long Fatal Love Chase, are reminiscent of those years when I was discovering love and madness.

I have every Kurt Vonnegut book ever written and have read most of them at least several times. That walk with Major Casebeer when he asked me what I loved about Vonnegut.

And what about One Hundred Years of Solitude? And the way that it reminds me of Love in the Time of Cholera and the way that Marquez brings me back to high school but also back to that cold morning bus ride across Zambia reading about the girl with African necklaces and red hair to her feet?

Anatomy of the Sacred? The fateful day that my philosophy of religion professor told me that being spiritual is like being musical, one must pick an instrument. Fateful words.

Or Africa: A Biography of the Continent, or Dark Star Safari. Both bought in the months before I left for the Peace Corps- my first naive attempts to understand what I was getting myself into.

Prozac Nation. All I have to do is randomly open that book and read a few paragraphs to be reminded of the black depression that gripped me in college and how that book kept me company and defined and described for me what was happening. Justified me.

Pablo Neruda's poetry, Tonight I Can Write. I can recite that poem from memory and still feel the emptiness but the possibility, too, of those years when I first discovered Neruda and didn't think that monotony could ever define life. When I thought love, passion, definitely pain and heartbreak, but not this drugery.

And then Keeping Still. The radical shift from a self-centered existence to the realization of the suffering of others. I cannot let them go.

I have a hardcover book on stargazing. How many nights did I spend out under the stars with that book and my telescope? Back to the days when I knew my dreams of spending my life in the mystery of nighttime were feasible, back when I had my whole life ahead to be happy.

Oh my god they are innumerable. They mean so much. They are the journal I never kept.

From the Center of the Earth: Stories Out of the Peace Corps is listed on Ebay now. Despite that I have about $100 to my name, I don't think I have the heart to sell these books.