“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them – with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself…”
*****
We sat at a table made of books in an apartment made of books pouring words from bottles into glasses whenever there was a break in the conversation. This was when we first started dating. Our favorite thing to talk about was all the books we would never read. Not that we ever admitted we would never read them – we planned to, it’s just life turned out to be such a finite thing.
Taking a sip, you told me, how you took your ex to the library once, when you lived in Seattle, how bored he was.
“Have you ever been to Seattle Central Library?”
“No,” I said, but you could hardly wait for me to answer, you were so excited.
“It’s like out of a Borges story! Eleven stories of glass and steel, shaped like a stack of books – in a kind of postmodern way, but still…”
You paused, knew you were forgetting something.
“And the book spiral. There’s a book spiral!”
We both loved Borges, we loved that about each other. We both kept little black leather-bound journals. I was working on a collection of short stories, you on a chapbook of poems about your first marriage. You wanted to be a tenured professor of literature, I was majoring in library sciences. One day, we’d be old and retire and have pensions, open a used book store. We’d finally have time for all those Russian novels.
“I’d never be bored in a library,” I said, thinking, then added: “Anxious, maybe. All those books, not sure which to read first…”
You smiled and took my hand across the table of books. I shifted in my chair of books, tried to imagine a book spiral. I wasn’t sure what it could be, but you seemed so well-read, I didn’t want to disappoint you by admitting there was anything I didn’t know. Instead, I imagined the libraries we would visit together in the years to come.
For our honeymoon, after graduation, we went to Seattle – stayed in a hotel just a few blocks from the library.
The next year, we both got nine-to-five jobs – just to pay off our student loans – you as a paralegal, I had a friend who got me a solid offer with an insurance company. Then came car payments, then the mortgage, then the kids, and here we are…
*
This morning you sit in the armchair with your phone in your lap, while I sit on the sofa, staring absently at the muted television. You’re updating your Facebook status, I’m reading the closed captions of a news report about the last bookstore in America closing its doors. The kids are playing games on their tablets, you make them turn the volume down.
Then, it’s all very quiet.
But outside, words pour from the sky without stopping. Across the bottom of the TV screen scrolls a warning, flash floods.
*****
…the picture at the top of the page is Eudora Welty’s house, the picture next to it, the front of Lemuria, a grand independent bookstore, both in Jackson, Mississippi. Jackson, as it turns out, is a grand town for books – at least it was for me. I have been travelling for work lately, and when there’s time, I will try to find an independent or used bookstore nearby to visit. It’s my habit to slip onto the shelves a copy of the chapbook of poems I published a few years back. It feels good to be on the shelves between Rilke and Dylan Thomas, if unearned. I always buy something too, usually, an unknown poet’s chapbook, if possible. It’s part of the karma somehow. Still, I didn’t find any unknowns this time. At Lemuria, I bought Rilke’s Stories of God. There was also a great used bookstore, called The Book Rack, the third photo, where I had a nice talk with the owner, who was celebrating his son’s bachelor party that night or else I believe he would have invited me for dinner. I bought a book of short story masterpieces, read one of Eudora’s tales in my hotel room, sipping Maker’s and eating a Whattaburger. Disgusting, I admit, but it helped to cure the loneliness I find in being away from my family.
The visit to Jackson’s better bookstores reminded me of my visit with my wife (fiancé then) to Seattle, nearly five years ago, to visit friends. The library made a great impression on me, thus the advent of the story above. Bibliomania is the obsessive compulsive disorder which involves hoarding and collecting books to a degree which affects functioning. I am not sure I am there yet, my wife is not quite ready to leave me over the books that are appearing and slowly taking over the rooms of our house, and I have not quite spent our savings on books. However, I have a deep understanding of Ms. Welty’s sentiments.
I do not lament the advent of e-books and electronic literature in general. Most of my reading these days is on my smart phone, my e-reader, or else Poetry magazine’s electronic archives. I am very impressed with the flash fiction site Smokelong Weekly/Quarterly, the work as well as the format. There are even some inventive blogs out there.
Language is constantly in flux, and necessarily, the forms must be continually reinvented. People will always take pleasure at the sounds of language, we will always make up stories to try and point to the mystery that the words themselves can’t quite capture. That’s what’s important. However, there’s a part of me that hopes that whenever I pass through Mississippi, I’ll always be able to stop at The Book Rack and Lemuria to pick up something to read for the road.