In a world of politics and war, migration crises and mass shootings, I’m lucky enough that I can take a break. I think it’s important that we all, in the spirit of maintaining at least some portion of our sanity, find a place we can go to escape. Thoreau had Walden Pond. Dylan Thomas had a boathouse in Laugharne. Virginia Woolf found solitude and time enough to write in a hut in Sussex. There’s somewhere out there for everyone.
Me? I find my bits of solace browsing the dusty, timeworn shelves of independent bookstores.
I know I’ve entered a magic circle when the musk and age of old books is as familiar as a favorite meal. There are many things Kindles can do more effectively than books, but the smell of a book is a sensory experience lost on the black-box confines of the Kindle’s inner machinations. If I were to name what it is about the aged smell of books that sends me into the center of my own being, it would have to be a sense of nostalgia — nostalgia for the countless fictional lives I’ll never live.
If, in the human struggles of day-to-day existence, you find yourself overworked and tired and generally put out, I suggest you make the soothing walk up and down the aisles of a bookstore. I don’t mean just any bookstore. As inseparable as it is from the bookish culture, Barnes & Noble hasn’t got the same anti-corporate angsty flavor of a place like, say, Utah Book & Magazine. I’m talking about the real, get lost in three-layers-deep science fiction paperbacks, vinyl-selling, ancient magazine and comic-section sort of bookstore. The kind of shop that, in its very layout, forces all sense of worry, organization and hubris to wait out on the street.
Not only do bookstores alleviate stress and anxiety, they make me feel small. I am surrounded by some of the greatest works of art ever created and am able to aspire to the morals of the most iconic and striving figures in the world — this just down the road from my house and for one or two dollars a book.
The bookstore is less about reading (though that’s certainly important) and more about the connection you can make with thousands of old voices. It is less about buying books (though that’s certainly important) and more about understanding the importance of infinity — infinity being, in my mind, the potential of any number of miracles to be inflicted on a person by the stuff between the front and back covers of an old book. This might be a stretch, but I would suggest bookstores package this ‘past’ and re-present it in a way that is accessible to the empathies and compassions of wayward book lovers.
If you’ve discounted much of this as sentimental or unabated nonsense, I ask you to look at the world around you. Is that not also sentimental and often unabated nonsense? We have it in the annals of our history and politics and culture the stink and rot of blood, ghosts and nonsense. With as much sincerity as I can conjure, I argue that books — and their vehicle, bookstores — are collectively the refuges and guides to a much less terrible future.
So the next time you’re stressed or worried, visit a bookstore. They’re becoming closer every day to mausoleums, to spectacles savaged by the advent of the e-reader. Take my word for it. They’re incredible.