Every book has a fate and that fate is its locomotion. It is passed from one hand to another, from one shelf to the next, to languish in an attic here only to be resurrected in a book shop hundreds of miles away. The lives of books mirror human lives in this and many other ways. Though their pages may contain all the wisdom of the world, they cannot access that wisdom. Though, as many great prophets have told us, we embody the divine we are similarly kept from the fountain within us. Dumb encasements, silent testaments to a knowledge we cannot conceive.
Perhaps this comparison will chafe those seekers among us, those masters of their own fates. After all, we are active, innovative and loud. Books are none of these things. Their passivity is deceptive, however, as one who has been unable to put a book down may testify. Theirs is a silent rapture that snares us into stasis and solitude, generates a shared and secret conversation. For who can divide a man from his own thoughts like the word on a page? Hardly the behavior of a passive object. It would serve us well to emulate books on this account, to speak silently to those who would listen and surrender to the gears of life that propel us, content to embody and deliver the word rather than to possess it.
In a bookshop one can watch such mysteries unfurl, the book shelved or cataloged yesterday or last year finding its next witness. So, too, the equivalent human conjunctions--those invisible lines of influence we trace across each others' paths. Certainly, mundane exchanges outnumber revelations, as grass outpopulates flowers in a field.
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Speaking of chance and fate, I'm still working on a board game based on the experiences of working in or frequenting used bookshops. It's a lot like Chutes & Ladders with book trivia thrown in. I hope to get a prototype made some time this year, now that my schedule is loosening up, so if you'd like to try it out and make suggestions to improve play let me know. I might even come up with caricatures of regulars to use as pieces, like Clue!
As for reading recommendations:
Atmosphere Apollinaire by Mark Frutkin [a very interesting treatment of one of the lesser known giants of La Belle Epoque]
The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages by Frederick Bodmer
Be excellent to each other.
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