Letter 17: On Serendipity
It was the Friday before Christmas, and mercifully we had been let out from work at noon. With a whole afternoon before me, I was eager not to waste it in spite of the insistence from weather forecasters that a storm was about to bear down upon our city. Some schools had shut down in anticipation of it, people chattered nervously about the road conditions, but history had shown such predictions to be fruitless, with each forecasted storm pummelling surrounding areas but missing the city itself. Mother Nature knew better than to hit a bunch of urbanites with the full strength of her fury. Our hands soft from office work, our backs sloped from hunching over the blue light of our computer screens, we are not people made for storms.
Outside the winds were strong and the sky let forth some snow, but this was winter weather, not an apocalypse. I would not be swayed from my destination, two little used bookshops, for even though I had shelves of unread books waiting for me at home, what I wanted on this afternoon was to find refuge in these warm havens and inhale air sweet with the scent of ideas pressed onto wood pulp.
Stop number one.
I am the only customer. The shopkeeper is shelving books and we exchange a quick hello then retreat to our respective tasks, I depleting and he replenishing the stock. There is a feeling of self-consciousness that overcomes you in a shared, silent space - a library, a church, an elevator - in which people move about with blinders on, remaining within the bounds of their interior worlds. The sound of your breathing becomes amplified, you wince as the plonk of the book you’re replacing on the shelf disturbs the silence. You get the creeping feeling that anyone in your vicinity is judging you, wishing you would leave, but then the barrier is broken, you go to pay for your items and there is a pleasant - friendly even! - interaction and the distortion you’ve built up in your mind evaporates.
Stop number two.
When you enter the shop you are greeted by rows of old mass market paperbacks, covers facing proudly forward, colourful and disheveled, an eclectic mix ranging from the profound - The Philosophy of Literary Form - to the practical - Everyday Japanese Characters - to the quietly ominous - The Irish. There is a special kind of delight that is cultivated by overcoming a preference for newness, which only breeds anxiety at the thought of a scuffed cover or torn page, as you come to realize the beauty of the worn and the gaudy, the uglier and more decrepit the better.
I overhear a conversation that you only hear in this kind of a place, the two shopkeepers like Ernie and Bert, one grumpy, the other more amicable, discussing the saga of a parcel delivery in which all that could go wrong did, a thousand plot twists and turns in what should have been a routine occurrence.
Melting snow drips from my boots and pools on the worn hardwood, seeping dangerously close to the piles of overflow books scattered about until one of the shopkeepers sweeps through with a ragged mop to soak it up.
I open various books and flip through pages as I browse, and soon a handwritten inscription catches my eye. Whether it be a coincidence or some kind of serendipity, a lump nevertheless manages to lodge itself in my throat.
Something has spoken to me in the night, and told me to lift up my heart again and have no fear, and told me I shall live and work and draw my breath in quietness again.
Who left this inscription? And for whom? Was it a note for a loved one, or perhaps for themselves, to fortify them when they opened its pages? And do they mind if I take it as my own? And who will find this note, who will need it, long after this book is no longer mine, after my hands are no longer here to hold it?
Thanks for reading. See you in two weeks.