The presence of more than one book is all about potential -- like romantic partners that you don't know too well yet. And like romantic partners -- there just isn't room for them all, and we can't have them all at the same time. Having them on the shelf is nice, but it can also create longing that there is no time to fulfil. (Hi Eddy!!)
Poet Matthew Arnold... interesting guy. In other words, the universe is indifferent. All we really have is one another. A poem much debated and satirized.
from Dover Beach, 1851 Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night
One of my favorite poems in the entire world. Do you have Spotify? There is a particular version of that poem set to music, and opening with a beautiful reading of the first verses. It is by The Fugs, a music and poetry group in NYC from the 60's onward. At any rate, they have this one haunting version that is much better than their other versions because of the reading in the beginning, -it's from their best of album, and the only place I've been able to find it online is Spotify. Dover Beach from their best of. Worth searching out. I read it as essentially an existential love poem, where the "individual starting point" is two people instead of the one, while the world remains just as indifferent and absurd.