Books

I went upstairs at the bookstore today. The three floors in the old building are filled with treasures and surprises too many to count. Almost every day I find a book that I need to trade some of my work for, to bring to Emily to put on her shelf. Lately, I have procured copies of Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Another Roadside Attraction, Hesse's Siddhartha, Palahniuk's Damned, and Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany. I have a list of others. High on it now are a Lenny Bruce Biography, Tropic of Cancer, and Bukowski; any of which you can feel free to come scoop out from under me.

The second floor is almost ready to have a film version of Franny and Zooey shot there, although we are currently out of stock on the book. Just clean up and arrange the furniture, hire your aloof yet genius youths, and your 1950s apartment with a view is ready to go.

There are antiques and spinning wheels and books. And books. And books. Above the bookstore that used to be a bank, where the high ceilings are blocked with new, lower ceilings, where the vault is full of law books, where there are so many books and rooms and nooks that one can literally get lost (I've seen it), there is a reminder hiding in a single building that the world is vast and unknowable to someone as trapped in singularity as me.

On the third floor, there are boxes of books stacked to the ceiling. The owners don't even know what is in there. I think about how each one of those books was a special time in at least on person's life, how much toil and work it took to get each of those books done, how hundreds of other people have read copies (maybe even the copy that is now on the 3rd floor of the bookstore) of some of those books. I think about how I will never read all of the books in the world.

It helps me to realize how amazing my life is. Out of all the possibilities that could happen to me, the perfect thing always does. I am reminded that I don't deserve anything. That's not to say that I'm not worthy, just that if I want something, it's my responsibility to make it happen. That thought makes me want things less. I do want love and security, I do want my writing to reach people and for them to enjoy it. But I am not a slave to this driving force anymore. That makes me appreciate the fact that I always have everything that I need. When I realize that love and companionship and money and safety and beauty and art are not automatic, I enjoy the gifts of this world and I also do not try to hold on to any of them any longer than I am supposed to. It is easy because there is plenty of love and art and money and power and all of that business in the world. There is enough to go around. There is no reason to try and hoard any of it for ourselves. So I don't. As a result of that, I have an abundance of all of these things. Funny how things work, isn't it?