Books, Blogs and Time

So, nothing bores me more than reading articles about whether the printed word is dying, books versus blogs, who reads and doesn't read novels blah blah blah. It is fascinating, though, when you take a step back from these kinds of arguments, just to *notice* how we're transitioning from one literacy to another, with all kinds of exciting possibilities.

And then, your mother ships you 180 pounds of books that had been sitting in her basement, mixed together with notebooks you'd forgot you'd written in, and takes you back in time.

Like a lot of people, I'm superstitious about throwing out books, even when they're damaged beyond readability. I volunteer at a used book store, and people are really upset if they suspect we might throw out their paperback with the torn cover and water damage, even if they know we can't possibly sell it.

So, one of the books in the box was James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. The price on the side is 60 cents and Alfred Kazin has a blurb on the back. The cover is missing as are all the pages up to 15. I remember reading this book more than ten years ago - as it often happens after that period, I don't remember much about the plot but I remember being overwhelmed by its beauty and sadness, and I remember wanting to go to Paris.

On page 16, I read this:

I began, perhaps, to be lonely that summer and began, that summer, the flight which has brought me to this darkening window.

And yet - when one begins to search for that crucial, the definitive moment, the moment which changed all others, one finds oneself pressing, in great pain, through a maze of false signals and abruptly locking doors. My flight may, indeed, have begun that summer - which does not tell me where to find the germ of the dilemma which resolved itself, that summer, into flight. Of course, it was somewhere before me, locked in that reflection I am watching in the window as the night comes down outside. It is trapped in the room with me, always has been, and always will be, and it is yet more foreign to me than those foreign hills outside.