I have been spending a lot of time at Blackwell’s, recently. The bookshop as remedy, reading as a cure for the ailments of the mind. This accompanied by a desire to touch, smell, and possess books, which doesn’t mean that borrowing books off friends is unattractive, but, still, not quite the same. My kindle rests, abandoned, on some corner of the cupboard, while I pile up books that I can neither really afford to buy, nor to keep with me as I lead a life of uncertainty, and not-knowing-where next.
All I dream of is a home with a library, just as I did when I was a child. Overall, I have been very childlike today, perhaps sparked by yesterday’s experience.
I started my day cooking creamy spinach with onion not entirely dissimilar to how my grandmother would do it (only she wouldn’t have spinach for breakfast, certainly wouldn’t eat it with pitta bread and peanut butter, and would probably frown at my use of soy milk). I had lunch at the market, where one can sample dishes from all over, and went for goulash with spätzle, which would usually not have occurred to me. Then, I went to the shops and bought the kind of chocolate I used to eat slowly, laboriously, licking out the inside creamy bits while nibbling on the outside chocolatey bits.
And then, well, I went to Blackwell’s. I never used to be a big book-buyer – libraries used to do the trick just fine. They were enough to enable me to dream of adventures, and maybe, some time, a house with a library of my own (or both; like the magical home of Inkheart, which infused me for a while with a desire to become a bookbinder, and, oh, all the other things!).
Today’s trip was more entertaining than usual. Sometimes, I just sit in the café and work, with the pleasant tingle of all the stories around the corner and the magnificent architecture of Oxford’s core through the window. Today, I had a purpose. Well, my purpose was to find a purpose. I had noticed feeling directionless as a result of being uncertain about the future (my own more as the general future, although you will know that that also bothers me).
Yesterday, a conversation made me think of turning to biography and led me to sitting in the café with Maya Angelou, hoping to find some story there that could give me guidance for my own. But then, I ended up leaving without buying it.
So I returned today, determined to achieve my mission. I asked one of the booksellers, a woman about my age who I have seen around before, and feel an affinity with. Sheepishly, I explained that I wanted books – fiction or non-fiction – about people “doing all sorts of things and finding a direction in life”. Instead of laughing at me, she went over to the till and enlisted the help of the two others there, who in a few moments’ time had piled my arms with tales of road trips, unfulfilled desires, commentaries of authors’ lives, and, weirdly, a book about hippies on LSD.
I went upstairs and found a random armchair in a corner, put down my pile, and disappeared into different worlds, a property that I used to be well-known for in my family (especially when there were household tasks to do), but that I hadn’t exercised much in the past few years. I found that one of the books had originally been written in German, so I went to find the original version. After I’d found the book, I looped back past images of beautiful letters, even more beautiful libraries, and it then so happened that the “creative writing” section appeared to my left. Not that I expected to find any insight there, especially with that distaste I have for a certain kind of self-help book. But just a quick look, you know…
And then I saw “The Science of Storytelling“. It didn’t smell as dreamy as the other hardcover I’d picked up a little earlier (that’s to say, that had been shoved in my hands by an eager bibliophile), but then I caught eye of its content.
“We know how this ends. You’re going to die and so will everyone you love. And then there will be heat death. All the change in the universe will cease, the stars will die, and there’ll be nothing left of anything but infinite, dead, freezing void. Human life, in all its noise and hubris, will be rendered meaningless for eternity.
But that’s not how we live our lives. (…) The cure for the horror is story. Our brains distract us from this terrible truth by filling our lives with hopeful goals and encouraging us to strive for them.”
That’s a first page that sold me a book.
Just like that, this page tapped into all of it: the fear of the void, the hope; and, finally, the burning desire to understand all of it. There was this ability to understand humans in terms of evolution-shaped bodies and brains, while not being rendered blind to the beauty of story, which might as well be the most beautifully human thing there is.
I wish the book luck in living up to that. And I might want to abstain from Blackwell’s at least until I have finished reading it.
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