The Spider God

There is a spider god living underneath my bookshelf, a thousand-eyed, thousand-armed horror. His name is Avalokiteshvara, and he eats books.

Good books, bad books, all kinds of books, but not just any books. He only eats books that he does not want me to put on the bookshelf, and he has his reasons for not wanting them there.

“You don’t want to read this,” he says.

“But I really ought to read it,” I tell him.

“Waste of time,” he says and eats a book about technology ethics.

“There goes another potential PhD thesis,” I say to him.

“It’s ok,” he replies. “You didn’t want to write it. You only thought you should be the sort of person who would want to write it.”

He eats any philosophy books I can’t understand, anything too businessy, and anything I’m waiting for someone to remark on to make them think I’m the sort of person who owns that book, has read it, understands it, and could engage in a meaningful conversation about it or, who knows, maybe go on to become a world renowned thought leader on the topic.

 Mercifully, he has eaten a lot of those.

He eats anything miserable, which I found upsetting on account of having substituted Notes from Underground for a personality.

He eats all the Russians. A whole Dostoevsky collection in one go.

Chomp!

He even eats all but two of my Kunderas.

“Miserable fucker,” he says.

On and on he goes. The carnage, the strips of paper! Great literary works reduced to meaningless existential confetti.

“Don’t need that Kierkegaard,” he says. “You don’t care what he’s on about. Died a miserable fucker.”

For this reason, I dare not attempt bringing any Nietzsche near the bookshelf.

I can just hear him.

“You don’t understand this,” he’d say. “Anyone who would really want you to is not someone you should bring into this house.”

“But how will I be taken seriously?”

“Just remember that he died a miserable fucker, is all I’m saying.”

The spider god is brutal.

“It’s for your own good,” he says. “After I eat the pretentious bullshit that’s been sitting around gathering dust for a decade, a yellowed copy of some ancient Aldous Huxley that you don’t care about, you’ll be better able to hear what the remaining books are telling you.”

I take a step back to get a better look at his work.

“My god,” I say. “You’re right.”

And the books whisper process poetry to me.

May all sentient beings be happy and free.

“My work here is done,” he says and withdraws the last giant, hairy leg from the bottom shelf before disappearing through a crack in the floor.