Shelf Life

Earlier this week I took what will probably be my last trip into the city, to spend gift certificates, and ended up wandering into a musty fusty archaic bookstore. There was, like all the best used bookstores, definitively no dewy decimal system at play on the shelves.

The owner and I took up an easy conversation about poetry (Steve Noyes in particular, though I can't seem to find any of his work online) traveling and personal libraries.

"I've thought about traveling," he said wistfully, "but I don't know what I'd do with my library."

"Well," I offered truthfully, " A good book is often better than a plane ticket."

I then admitted that letting go of my library felt like letting go of hundreds of my favourite friends. I told him how I'd had a home lined up for my books but that fell through at the last minute and I'd been forced to sell most of them. We commiserated, this stranger and I, surrounded by books stacked perilously close to the ceiling with only a tiny twisting path between them. Did I say stranger? He understood this ink and paper part of me in a way few others ever will or could; how could he be anything but a kindred soul.

He glanced at the clock and announced he had to get to his call center job, the one he worked so he could afford to keep his personal library, this store, so I had to leave without a single book.

Driving home later that night, after curry take-out for dinner and one last visit with an old workmate at the bingo hall, I started thinking about these used bookstore owners. They are, inevitably, aging hippie males, curmudgeonly with no regard for wealth or status and I couldn't help but wonder- then fret about- what will happen when these men retire and close shop. Who, in the age of the e-kindle, will fill the gap and become the keepers and guardians of my favourite friends? Where will I go to wile away hours among the stacks, discovering new worlds and reuniting with old friends, when there are no more cranky beatnik bibliophiles to horde these antiquarian tomes? How will I identify kindred souls in 2040?

"Things come and go in life to help us change.

Once the moment of change comes, we must let the situation go.

If we resist, the situation will completely drain us.

It is not easy to let go, but it is much more painful

to try to hold on to something that wants to pass."

-Zen Life, Daniel Levin