“We have enough books,” my wife would say. In one sense, this was undeniably true.

“A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it,” George Carlin once said. I’ve thought of this joke often since our house burned to the ground last month.

I thought about it a lot before, too. In fact, it popped into my head the very morning of the fire, as I drove west on Sunset Boulevard into the Pacific Palisades, passing stores, churches, and schools that would be reduced to smoking rubble in the next 48 hours.

I was returning from dropping off our Christmas decorations at our storage space in San Fernando. The 90-minute round trip had spoiled my initial sense of accomplishment. Now I began to ruminate on the absurdity of the task--of having so many possessions that we essentially needed to rent a separate apartment for the overflow.

I became obsessed with organizing and culling my library; I thought about my books more than I read them.

Why, I wondered, did we have so much stuff?

That’s when I thought of Carlin. I was waiting at the stoplight on Chautauqua. Then I looked up and saw the ominous cloud of black smoke billowing up in the hills.

Standing in the rubble, Matt Himes surveys what remains of his home.Matt Himes

Lately, I’d sensed that I was living in a “pile of stuff.” Before it all went up in smoke, it seemed like my biggest problem. I couldn’t stay on top of what I had, yet I couldn’t seem to stop adding to the pile.

I especially loved books. I had something like 5,000 scattered throughout the house—a meager amount for a true bibliomaniac, but enough to overwhelm me and irritate my family.

A house has space for a certain number of books, and our space was filled. The built-in shelves were deep enough that I'd arranged two layers of books on them, with others wedged horizontally above each row. I'd stuffed linen drawers with NYRB paperback originals and filled a dozen banker's boxes with Catholic theology, medieval history, and self-help. I stuck these in the back of the 1989 Land Cruiser parked in the driveway.

The fact that I bought and stored most of them made me feel like a hoarder. At the same time, I could flatter myself by considering what I had here to be an “anti-library,” a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb for a collection of books meant to remind you of all the ones you hadn’t read. Taleb discusses this (citing the example of Umberto Eco, who reportedly owned more than 50,000 volumes) in his best-selling book Black Swan.

I owned a copy of Black Swan but had yet to open it. Instead I encountered Taleb’s theory in one of those blogs curating rarefied click bait for discerning scrollers. The post ends with the author unable to resist bragging that he, too, shares the Eco mindset.

Upon seeing my library of over 5,000 books, a friend commented, “You’ll never read all of these.” And they’re right. But the point isn’t to read all of them. Good books are anything but a commodity. Having a library full of them is, in many ways, wealth.

I may not have read all of them, but I know each one all the same. If I close my eyes, I can imagine them in their places on the shelves. And I can imagine the flames licking at their pages and blackening their covers.

If that’s the case, I’m sorry to say the events of January 7 utterly ruined me.

Days before, I had tempted fate by taking a picture of myself ostentatiously posing with some of my vast fortune. I meant to parody a post that had been making the rounds recently: a young woman proudly displaying stacks of her 2024 reading with the caption, “110 books down this year.”

The joke was that virtually all of her selections were those recently published, brightly colored “romantasy” paperbacks beloved by a certain brand of online “book lover.” For my version I chose some of the most mischievously outré volumes in my collection: David McGowan’s serial killer, mind-control expose Programmed to Kill, Graham Watkins’s self-published Rhodesian civil war memoir Once Upon a White Man, Passage Publishing’s wonderful Steve Sailer anthology Noticing, dozens of Chick tracts I’d ordered in bulk, and A. L. Rowse’s Homosexuals in History.

Matt Himes took this self-portrait of himself and his books months before they were lost to the LA fires.Matt Himes

All those books are gone now (except Camp of the Saints, which I’d left in my minivan), as are the other treasures from my home office: the expensive Shure pod casting mic; the old wooden Jesus church statue; the art school nude my wife picked up at an antique shop in Ellsworth, Maine. Now I’m glad to have that photo, which I almost couldn’t be bothered to take.

A Lifetime of Books

I’ve always been a compulsive, indiscriminate reader. I’ve always preferred to stay inside with a book. As a kid, my regular trips to our modest local library ended with me staggering out under the weight of a precariously balanced haul: the latest bloated Stephen King release; cocked-spined Ed McBain and Robert P. Parker paperbacks; grim ‘70s YA fare like Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!; sober yet terrifying investigations of Bigfoot and UFOs.

As I grew older, my tastes became more self-consciously highbrow, although my ambition often exceeded my ability to concentrate. This was especially true of the fashionable “postmodern” tomes I accumulated at college—I never managed to get through more than a page or two of Derrida—but it also applied to more worthwhile authors.

I’d been fascinated by The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet in high school when I first encountered them in the battered, pulp-novel-sized Folger Library editions our English teacher handed out. By any measure, the handsome Riverside Shakespeare I’d acquired as a college man was an upgrade, but its five and-a-half pounds and 1,700 pages of densely printed scritta paper made reading a physically onerous experience.

Nonetheless, after securing my “Comparative Literature” BA, I dutifully lugged this monster—along with a number of other totems of my vague intellectual aspirations—back home to Pennsylvania.

Then, about a month later, I went to Czechoslovakia. It was there that my future awaited. What it held, I had no idea—just that it had little to do with my job teaching conversational English to gas company executives. Somehow, it was to be found in the books I carried with me to every makeshift living space during my five-year stay—from that first communist-era high-rise studio apartment in Ústí nad Labem to a motley series of furnished rooms and illegal sublets scattered throughout Prague.

Mind you, this was the early '90s, when what we now call physical media was the only option. Very few of us foreigners had TVs or even telephones. And those old enough will remember that everyone read much more back then—in bed, on the train, at the park. So, my attachment to these objects was less irrational than it may seem. Finding a specific book in English certainly wasn’t impossible (even in 1993, Prague had the expat-founded Globe bookstore, which had a sizable, regularly replenished selection), but it was far from guaranteed.

I went through more books—with far greater intensity—than I ever have before or since. I needed to read, not only to stave off boredom, loneliness, and despair, but also because it brought me a rush of pleasure and contentment that nothing else could.

It was exhilarating for a long while, but I suspected I’d been mistaking the acquisition of these books for wisdom itself.

The reading I remember most vividly from that time came my way haphazardly and mostly fell in the “guilty pleasure” category: the chapter of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, which I painstakingly went through with one of my Czech gas company students; Martin Cruz Smith’s Polar Star, which got me through a long, delirious night burning up with the flu in a freezing studio apartment; Dark Water by Patricia Highsmith, whose strange genius I was so grateful to discover that I laughed out loud as I rode an empty tram one Sunday afternoon.

Still, it was mostly my “serious” books that made the journey back with me when I returned to America and tried my luck in New York, temporarily landing at a friend’s decrepit, converted warehouse space in south Williamsburg.

From there, I lugged them up five flights of stairs to my sweltering, closet-sized room in an East Village apartment, where I stacked them by the window with a view of the air shaft. I carried them back across the river to a short-term sublet on Bedford Avenue, where they were ignored by the enterprising burglars who made off with my new laptop and an old Nikon camera one Easter weekend. I carefully organized them on milk crate shelves in a basement room in Clinton Hill, where the deluge from a broken pipe in the ceiling almost turned them to pulp.

These books had little monetary worth, but their sheer number made them probably my most valuable asset—certainly the bulkiest. They had also become a kind of spiritual burden. Since I was a kid, I had always worried about death and what it all meant. Like most non-religious people, I deferred the question. At the time, I channeled my anxiety into building the kind of inoffensive, “well-rounded” high school career that got you into a good college in those days.

That goal was achieved, but I couldn’t find another. I chose classes where we read “texts” and wrote about them. I learned to mimic the style encouraged by the untenured faculty in the trendiest regions of the literature department. I got good grades like everyone else (this was the humanities, after all), except when I forced a professor’s hand by submitting work months late, if I submitted it at all. I managed to graduate with no strategy besides a vague urge to ac cumulate experience and “find myself.” The books I’d salvaged from my incoherent and incomplete education were to be my guide.

The Heavy Burden of Possession

Here I was, almost ten years later, still carefully tending to these sacred talismans. Each time I packed them up I felt increasingly ridiculous: a man pushing 30 with no steady career and no plans for a family, a man whose most lasting commitment was to the future, and the enlightened version of himself contained in those boxes.

Paul Taylor

Just in time I met my wife, also a book worm, whom I’d briefly dated during those bright college years. I proposed by hiding an engagement ring in a nook I’d cut out in the pages of a book.

She was more driven than I was—or more resilient. She had a thriving career in finance, a wealth of rewarding, scrupulously maintained friendships, and a large, close-knit family, all of which enriched my life immensely.

We combined our collections in a spacious modern loft with ample shelving in Dumbo. We had one child, relocated to her hometown of Los Angeles, then had another child. Our third was born just as we moved into our recently purchased house that would succumb to the wildfires twelve years later.

My books and I had made it to our final destination. I’d been terrified of commitment, but it turned out domestic life suit ed me. I was still restless, but the creative types I knew in LA gave me a more tangible idea of success to emulate. The glacial pace of life with young children could drive me crazy at times, but on better days it felt as if we’d stumbled into some kind of perpetually 75 degrees and sunny eternity.

Our kids started getting older, of course—and so did we. My wife was happily occupied, enjoying a more active social life than ever. She managed a successful career while somehow also handling every birthday party and making every soccer game.

I wasn’t busy enough. Freelancing gave me the flexibility to get the kids to school, but it also gave me too much time to start and abandon project after project: screen plays, a YA novel, a web series.

I used to take pleasure in looking at the eclectic library I’d amassed. Now, the sight of it depressed me. It used to signify the unlimited potential of the future; now it reminded me of my chronic inability to choose any one path and follow it.

Worse, I realized there was no reason to choose a particular path, just as there was no reason to select a particular book. Putting all those volumes together in one place couldn’t force their contents to cohere to any form of truth. I was in my mid-40s, and no answers to my lifelong questions were forthcoming: there was no God, and I was going to die. The older I got, the harder it was to pretend otherwise.

My father, on the other hand, was actually dying. He’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a few years before. My parents had long been divorced; I hadn’t lived in the same town as him since kindergarten. We appreciated each other, and shared the same sense of humor, but weren’t particularly close. As his condition made his already infrequent visits out west impossible, it occurred to me that the opportunity to say anything I wanted to say to him was slipping away. But I had my own problems, and then it was too late.

Memories of What Was

My first memory of dad is at the beach. A wave has yanked a toy from my hand; he ventures into the deeper water to look for it. A few minutes later, he returns, out of breath and empty-handed. I don’t remember the heartbreak of losing whatever it was that I lost—and I’m sure I was upset—I just remember his gentle tone of regret, as if he felt the loss as sharply as I did.

My dad was a collector too—antiques instead of books. Maybe it’s from him that I get the impulse to make the world smaller and more comprehensible by curating it. As his dementia worsened, my stepmother found she could occupy him for an hour or two by seating him at a table on which she’d emptied a box of old family photos, some dating back more than a century. He’d shuffle them around like sepia playing cards, organizing and reorganizing them based on criteria known only to him.

Like his sense of humor, his urge to collect was one of the last things to go. On trips to Target, some piece of mass-produced, made-in-China houseware would catch his eye, and he’d study it appreciatively as if appraising it at an auction. Often, he couldn’t bear to leave it behind and my stepmom would have to buy it for him.

I still have all my faculties, but in the last few years, I’ve wondered if I haven’t fallen into the same delusion. I still love to shop, particularly for books. Nothing concentrates my mind like entering a bookstore and methodically separating the wheat from the chaff. I map LA’s sprawl according to the location of my favorite sources: The Iliad in North Hollywood (a favorite of Paul Giamatti, who posed on the store couch for the New York Times); Book Alley in Pasadena (less than a mile from the storied Vroman’s); The Last Bookstore downtown.

It was on feverish excursions to these places and others that I bought most of the books that burned. In the last five years, my zeal for book buying came back even stronger. As Carlin also says, a house is just “a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get . . . more stuff!”

Before the fires, I would’ve found this truth bitter; now it mostly seems like a blessing. At some point during my crisis, I discovered a time-honored trick. Instead of waiting for an epiphany about what it all meant, I could simply decide to believe in God--and keep deciding it, day after day. In fact, the Christianity I'd always thoughtlessly dismissed had a complete system for making this happen.

My conversion to Catholicism didn't involve any kind of mystical experience. I read my way into it: G.K. Chesterton; Pope Benedict XVI; Night's Bright Darkness, a stunning memoir by the British poet Sally Read. Just as important were the everyday posts of the many anonymous Catholics I came across online—each a testament to the fact that faith was less about emotion than it was about understanding the truth about reality. There was a world beyond this one, but this world wasn’t all bad. It and everything in it was infused with grace.

That obviously extended to books. In the beginning was the Word, after all. In his 2006 Christmas Eve homily, Pope Benedict XVI cites a verse from the Greek translation of the Old Testament anticipating the birth of Christ, a verse that Paul goes on to quote: “God made his Word short, he abbreviated it.”

The world had an order to it, and knowledge of this order—in whatever “abbreviated” form–was accessible through words. I had a newfound reason to live—and to build my library. I was going to learn Latin and Koine Greek. I could scrap my scattered at tempts to understand philosophy and start over with Aristotle and then Aquinas. And there were so many Catholic novelists I’d never heard of: Muriel Spark, Alice Thomas Ellis, George Bernanos, Gene Wolfe.

It was exhilarating for a long while, but I suspected I’d been mistaking the acquisition of these books for wisdom itself. How many old missals and John Henry Newman collections and pocket editions of The Imitation of Christ did I really need?

I became obsessed with organizing and culling my library; I thought about my books more than I read them. Worst of all, it seemed they were cutting me off from my family, filling the space between us and crowding them out of my thoughts. I craved regular confession but didn’t always have the words for my sins. This scrupulosity became a kind of catch-all for everything I needed God’s help to fix.

What can I say but “be careful what you pray for”?

Fahrenheit 451

It’s truly sad and shocking to lose your house, to witness your friends and family lose theirs, and to endure the cataclysmic destruction of the entire neighborhood where you raised your children. But I’m grateful to go through it as a Catholic. We’re all safe and comfortable, with a future we can face with determination and optimism; if this kind of suffering sanctifies us, it seems like the training wheels version. Not that I'm asking for anything more advanced!

What surprises me is how little I miss my books. Mostly, I feel relieved. After all the hours I spent shuffling and reshuffling my collection, the pitiless conflagration took them all off my hands.

Where we lived has mostly been reduced to rubble and ash, so it’s natural to think of what happened as the loss of a simple whole: our house.

But when I marvel at how efficiently the f ire accomplished this total destruction, I realize the magnitude of its task. It had to burn up each and every possession I can think of. And books are what I had the most of.

Paul Taylor

I may not have read all of them, but I know each one all the same. If I close my eyes, I can imagine them in their places on the shelves. And I can imagine the flames licking at their pages and blackening their covers. Maybe this is my Marie Kondo-ish way of saying thank you and goodbye.

Once I thought of it, I couldn’t shake the image of my burning books from my mind. At first, it was so viscerally specific; it was a way of experiencing something we only knew through the aftermath. It was eerie and disturbing, yet in the thrilling way a horror movie can be.

Now I see beauty in the image as well. It reminds me of another passage from Pope Benedict, this from the encyclical Spe salvi. Again, he cites Paul, who is discussing Jesus Christ as the foundation of the Christian life, the ultimate success of which will be revealed by fire:

“If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (1 Corinthians 3:14-15).

I find it helpful to read and reread Benedict’s interpretation of this verse, which I can access right on my phone. At the very least, it provides a welcome break from the bureaucratic tedium of insurance claims. Benedict acknowledges that the fire Paul mentions does burn us, but the pain is in service of our ultimate liberation. It “transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves.”

Not a bad way to look at it, when you can summon the necessary attitude. Losing is how we win the freedom of being truly ourselves. Or, as George Carlin puts it, “If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time.”

Matt Himes is the managing editor of Align for Blaze Media.