Weeks after Ondoy, I deliberately postponed grief for all the stuff I had lost. After all, these were things that you could replace by just a quick trip to the mall. Well, at least most of them. Only recently did the realization of permanent loss sink in. For a while I thought it was the world's way of punishing me for the things I wrote about Kris Aquino. Or maybe it was God's way of saying we've got too many books.

"The most effective weapon of any man is to have reduced his share of histrionics to a minimum," says Andre Malraux, who knew, according to the great critic and book reviewer Michael Dirda, that "our natural tendency is to exaggerate our sorrows, anger, and desires. But deep within we know that we are overreacting, indeed overreacting. We get caught up in the situation, carried by our own pleasure in personal melodrama." In this the Zen masters certainly knew the power of mental clarity, stillness, and detachment.

Maybe we're just being hyperbolic about the demands of our so-called minds. Maybe we should all reach that stage where we've reduced our collection to a single shelf. I remember my visit to Hanoi many years ago, and was dumbstruck to find out that Ho Chi Minh had spent the last few years of his life in an absurdly small room, with a tiny bedside shelf containing only less than a handful, mainly tomes on poetry and engineering. That's how I want to be in my old age: a collection reduced to six, nine, ten titles. Books you know by heart, which you have studied with Talmudic devotion. But how does one reach that stage except through a process of elimination that entails the reading of thousands of books?

The Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius spoke of an "interior citadel." The mind later shifts to contemplation as you stare helplessly at the overturned cabinets, the wrecked piano, and boxes upon boxes of wet vinyl records. You will ruminate on the senselessness of worldly possessions, until you see all the damaged manuscripts. Your thoughts turn to the vast indifference of the cosmos. Then you step on a clump of dog shit. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger–but might give you athlete's foot and moldy books.

Illustration by Warren Espejo