22 December 04
The Muttering of Old Books
Dale has opened an interesting thread, taken up by Jarrett, on going to a bookstore—perhaps the finest bookstore in the world, Powells—and feeling less than excited, newly so, about the books on the shelves. He describes the “dreary hopelessness” of walking through the philosophy section, an experience that used to be so satisfying.
I suggested this might be a distribution problem—that the really good new stuff is out there, hiding, unpublished and unnoticed because of corporate decisions relating to “the market” (us) and its perceived desires. I think it might not be that simple, though, having thought about it further.
Walter Benjamin spent weeks at a time not talking to other people. Cornel West doesn’t do this. There are demands on his time that are probably getting in the way of some writing that might, in fact, get Dale really excited. If not West, then others. Very few of us know how to be alone.
What are the really important books of our time? Can we know? This is a question that has been asked in different ways by many different bloggers, some of whom appear in the list at left and many more that don’t. Is this also a function of our failure to embrace aloneness and thinking hard? I’m not sure, but I think we need to keep looking. I think we need to keep going to Powell’s. Like Icarus falling unheeded into the drink, we may not know for some time.
I was talking this afternoon with a mentor from my publishing past, who told me that Vicky Nelson, author of The Secret Life of Puppets, puts it this way in answer to someone who was getting less than excited by the books in her high-powered reading group: forget the reading group. Go to the grimiest used bookstore you can find and head for the dustiest section. Something will leap off the shelf at you, and it won’t be what you’re expecting. It might be Icarus.
A childhood friend has recently left the rat race and opened her own used bookstore in Picton, Ontario. Olivia & Co comes with the eponymous cat draped over comfy furniture. It’s not very grimy, at least from the photos I can see on her website, but I’ll bet there are a few gems in there. And at the very least there’s a cat to balance the muttering of old books, as Jarrett puts it.
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Tove Jansson, who chose to live on a tiny island in the Baltic Sea, also moved me with her Moominland books. Her most recent book before she died, “The Summer House”, gave me a very clear and insightful view into her lifestyle and philosophy, one in which human nature and the Earth or one, not separate.
Anthony Storr wrote an interesting treatise on solitude called “Solitude”, but it was rather too dry for me. Treating solitude in such a clinical manner sort of takes away the allure of being alone, and just makes it feel more lonely.
When I was a boy, I dreamed of being a hermit living in the mountains (part of me still dreams of that). One of my favorite books was “My Side of the Mountain”. I used to go out alone to the hills outside Tokyo and practice the survival skills of the boy in the book. Of course, in Japan, it is very hard to be any place without people swarming all over you.
I’m just wondering if people today do less well with being alone because it is so much harder to be alone now. People aren’t in practice. Until one hundred years ago most people probably spent quite a lot of time alone, wihtout talking to anyone, not even with such connections like the internet. People HAD to learn how to be alone. And so the books were probably more comfortable about it then those of today are.
Everyone’s writing about solitude on this solstice! See also Paula at Affiction:
http://affiction.blogspot.com
Of course, I realize I’m rather brain-addled when it comes to books, but we tend to be dramatic and over-protective of our closest and dearest friends, now don’t we?
Milan Kundera, in his novel “Slowness” talks about “Les Liaisons dengereuses” as epistolary form that’s not only a device, but also a crucial element of the story and of the point being made. He says that the epistolary (letter) form “tells us that whatever the characters have undergone they have undergone for the sake of telling about it, for transmitting, communicating, confessing, writing it.” In that somewhat distant 18th century world of the novel, according to Kundera, “everyone seems to live inside an enormous resonating seashell where every whispered word reverberates, swells into multiple and unending echoes.”
A bit like the way we carry on the blogosphere, wouldn’t you say?
A bit like the way we carry on in the blogosphere, wouldn’t you say?