Sometimes I visit the bookstore to see these friends, and I often find myself just thumbing through books, not so much reading, but touching, feeling, smelling, hearing them and the writing within, like the long coded strands of souls that inhabit those pages, ciphered with symbols that represent all their loves and passions, their failures and successes, their time on earth that we empathized with as our own time, from the writer's mind to the page and then to our own mind, like the transmigration of a soul shared by us all and stored on shelves where entire worlds are packed into creaking wooden boxes, stacked one upon the other, waiting for a new owner to free them so that they may live in the imagination of a mind once again, and give hope and understanding to others.
The bookstore is a mystical place with a hidden architecture that is encoded within covers, that constructs some magnificent, invisible, undiscovered edifice of interweaving lives and adventures through an interdimensional space that can only expand and enrich through the mind of the beholder who has come to explore. And yet that whole hidden edifice, that magnificent lexical DNA is bounded within an often ugly (not always so), dank, dark and dinghy little three dimensional shell that is the bookstore itself. The contrast is staggering. Infinity, potential, beauty, bound up within clumsy walls and cracking shelves, attended to by an old man in the corner. When you listen closely, you hear those voices chattering all around you, telling great stories, relating great adventures, yet lying there now, rotting in some corner, needing eyes to spring back to life and offer once more the riches they were meant to give.
Because ultimately, the bookstore is a repository of the gifts mankind has bestowed on itself. It is a holy place where we entrust the souls of our forefathers. It is the repository of humanity, and should be treated as a sacred and hallowed place. To step in, one should remove one's hat (metaphorically speaking) and lower one's voice (as we all instinctively do). There is Jane and Emily in the A's and B's, and a copy each of Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights, the testaments of a passionate inner life trapped in a world of limitations, precocious, before their time, their sacrifice given and shared for posterity. You feel gratitude toward them. Further down, you greet George Orwell, and you relive his touching, human portraits of misery, poverty and injustice in The Road to Wigan Pier, his depiction of the futility and alienation of middle class life in Coming Up For Air, his satire of totalitarianism in Animal Farm, the life of the destitute in Down and Out in Paris and London, the chilling dystopian despair of 1984, and his wonderful bookstore within the bookstore, his own personal Notes From Underground, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. You move on through the Dostoevsky's and Tolstoy's, perhaps one or two volumes of Proust lying around, thumbing through any random page, taking in a whole passage comprised of a single sentence, and wondering again why you never finished In Search of Lost Time. And then of course Jules Verne and his fantastic adventures at the dawn of science, in the wonder of the 19th century, the age of brilliant, intrepid, genius explorers setting off on fantastic journeys yet always ensconced in the comfortable safety of 19th century bourgeois trappings, velvet couches, brass lamps and libraries always at hand, where the armchair adventurer can find a safe harbor in new worlds. You'll find T.S. Eliot's Cocktail Party, Wasteland and Prufrock, and read again those haunting lines; you'll stumble upon a copy of Borges's Labyrinths and wonder in awe, as you always did, at the Library of Babel; and you'll sense your feelings stir and your mind itch and the voices call you away when you see a worn copy of On The Road, even as regrets well up within you. Those friends will be there on those shelves, faithfully standing sentinel, as if they know you and are expecting you. They speak to you, and you find solace in the fact that your troubles are not unique, that we all share the same trials and loneliness, but that somehow it isn't a cause for despair, because they are alchemists who have found the formulas that convert despair into something beautiful and sacred.
There is, besides that great architecture of imagination, a deeply palpable physical dimension to the secondhand bookstore. It is a place of dying. Not in a metaphoric sense only, though a case could be made for that (reading always makes me conscious of death). Death in a real physical sense. The leaves upon which those words are written, the wooden shelves hewn from dead trees, the long dead writers, the pensioner tending to the books, the young student who reminds you that your best days are past, all of it reeks of death and dying. But most of all it's the haunting silence and passing of time in the bookstore that conveys a sense of mortality. The rush outside is somehow magically left at the door once you enter the bookstore and you feel that time has stood still. We are solemn once inside, we are humbled and respectful, like someone who has entered a church or a cemetery. Your self-consciousness dissipates, your mind retracts, your self-assuredness recedes. Great names line those walls and shelves. Great stories, great deeds, great longings, great ideas are left behind, with their names, like ghosts, but the great men and women themselves have long since perished. There may even be a part of them there, atoms of Lucretius himself even, in the pages and the shelves that their imagination still occupies in a strange kind of mixture of life and death for which there is no word.
I always pause for a second once I have entered the secondhand bookstore. Then I walk again in a forest of waking lives past, upon which have been built these great edifices of the mind and spirit, and I always discover a welcome sense of mystery in life once again.
