Aging & Wisdom Quote by Augusten Burroughs

Burroughs turns a polite hobby into a small manifesto about intimacy, taste, and survival. “Very old books” aren’t just objects here; they’re proof of endurance. In a culture that fetishizes the new, he’s declaring loyalty to things that have already been handled, judged, nearly discarded, and somehow made it through. That’s classic Burroughs: affection aimed at the slightly battered, the emotionally freighted, the artifacts that carry a whiff of other lives.

The “both give and receive” matters as much as the books. He’s framing old books as a two-way social act, not solitary connoisseurship. Giving an old book is a kind of curated confession: I’m telling you who I am, what I think you can hold, and what I think you need. Receiving one accepts that invitation and all its implied obligations - to read, to keep, to remember. It’s a relationship model disguised as gift etiquette.

There’s also a sly rejection of pristine consumer culture. New books arrive clean, identical, unmarked by anyone’s past. Old books come with annotations, smells, stains, cracked spines - the evidence of prior attention. Burroughs’ work often treats damage as biography; “very old” signals that the value isn’t just in the text but in the accumulated life around it. Loving that exchange is a way of saying: I trust history, including the messy parts, more than I trust packaging.