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No Man Is an Island; Every Book Is a World
But me-also-thinks my latter-day reaction speaks to the necessity of encountering stories at precisely the right time in our lives.
Remember, Maya: the things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa.
A well-meaning townie (W-MT) will sidle up to the desk. “Any word on Tamerlane?” [Translation: May I turn over your significant personal loss for my own amusement?] A.J. will reply, “Nothing yet.” [Translation: Life still ruined.]
She was pretty and smart, which makes her death a tragedy. She was poor and black, which means people say they saw it coming.
A.J. watches Maya in her pink party dress, and he feels a vaguely familiar, slightly intolerable bubbling inside of him. He wants to laugh out loud or punch a wall. He feels drunk or at least carbonated. Insane. At first, he thinks this is happiness, but then he determines it’s love. Fucking love, he thinks. What a bother.
The most annoying thing about it is that once a person gives a shit about one thing, he finds he has to start giving a shit about everything.
You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?
“Sometimes books don’t find us until the right time.”
“No one travels without purpose. Those who are lost wish to be lost.”
“He knows she isn’t perfect. She knows he definitely isn’t perfect. They know there’s no such thing as perfect.”
“It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us,” the passage goes, “but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable. Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down a road. And someday, you do not know when, he, or indeed she, will be there. You will be loved because for the first time in your life, you will truly not be alone. You will have chosen to not be alone.”
Someday, you may think of marrying. Pick someone who thinks you’re the only person in the room.
“The Beauties” by Anton Chekhov, “The Doll’s House” by Katherine Mansfield, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by J. D. Salinger, “Brownies” or “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” both by ZZ Packer, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” by Amy Hempel, “Fat” by Raymond Carver, “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway.
Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so that we can be exhilarated every now and again.
A man is not his own island. Or at least a man is not optimally his own island.
Maya, novels certainly have their charms, but the most elegant creation in the prose universe is a short story. Master the short story and you’ll have mastered the world,
the point of it all is.
To connect, my dear little nerd. Only connect.
We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone. My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.
In the end, we are collected works.
“Maya, we are what we love. We are that we love.”
“We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on.”
A place ain’t a place without a bookstore,
