I think I tend to idealize the past. The novels I write are set decades ago, describing the little intimacies of everyday life with a fervor that verges on the romantic. Sometimes I wish I knew how to write about wars, or dragons, or epics along the lines of one I planned with my friend Joyce (who gave me the idea for this issue). However, I find I am best when my writing is about possible lives, potential stories, probable lovers. There are brilliant writers who can tackle the huge topics in the manner of a person carving up the turkey at a holiday dinner—the critical job, or at the very least the most visible. During these occasions, I would much rather sit on the windowsill, a book splayed open in my hand, and sip tea while I watch the lives outside.
It is a common wonder to question what someone else’s life is like. I assume the most frequent solution is to discover the other in the pages of a book. Since I was very young, I’ve found solace in novels that provide impressions from another life. There is comfort distilled from the pen of a skilled writer: their ability to make you dream about being somewhere else, and perhaps to bring a bit of the dream back with you. Reading a novel is a kind of time travel unto itself. The Netherfield ball happened when Jane Austen wrote it, when the first reader followed her words across the page, when I paged through it as an excitable middle schooler, and repeats at a constant rate in my memory. The reader’s mind is one of perpetual movement.
My favorite place in my city is a used bookstore twenty minutes away from home. The first time I went I got Geronimo Stilton, the last time I went I got Les Misérables, and this speaks to the range found from the times in between. Walking through the doors of the store (a ramshackle, crowded, beige-coloured sort of place) from the dismal gray and separation of the sidewalk is like going through the looking glass. At once you are pulled from the dissonant, untouchable realities of strangers to the remainders of love found in the books before you. No matter how hard they try, people leave pieces of themselves behind. Cramped handwriting spelling a dedication on the inner cover. Dog-eared pages lying in restless wait for the next owner.
Creases in a paperback’s spine. It is an exercise in nostalgia.
We experience the past, which is unreachable; the present, so often unfathomable; and the future, inconceivable. There is then the used bookstore, which seems to unite the virtues of these three locales with a certain elegance. You walk in overwhelmed by the lives that exist in the pages around you, the people created by the writers and previous owners of their works. The future is narrowed to a single point: which book will I read tonight? You peruse the shelves, perhaps indulging in my habit of running a finger along the spines of your favorite books. Like old friends, you greet them with a sense of ease. Here romance is rampant. It is easy to fall into the familiar, and by some strange extension to find comfort in the embrace of what is far from you.
I suppose that’s why I love owning books that someone else held once. The story doesn’t feel quite so solitary then. I recall the tradition of folk tales, works made to be performed and shared, the history of literature which is the history of love, in a way. Someone recites a poem about longing at a campfire and you look at the person you fancy over the flames. Someone sings about an old friend and it sounds like the voice of someone you once knew. Someone repeats a fable that their grandmother told them and you cross-reference with what your grandmother told you. Oral tradition continues today with the same sense of warmth.
A used book, more than a cheaper alternative with greater life than the starched offerings at nationwide retailers, is proof that even the written word is still shared. My copy of Madame Bovary is a small, yellowing thing, with creases in the spine and occasional stains on the pages. I bought it because I wanted to read the book and it was four dollars, sufficient motive to overlook how I hated the drawing on the cover. But I carried it in my purse, on boats and trains and buses, and closed it at 11pm on a subway to nowhere in Vancouver with a long sigh. I remember how I felt coming back into being under the white lights. I remember wondering whether the last person who held the book felt the same way.
Sonder is defined as the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. Literature is a way to dip into those lives, to peer around another person’s existence without undermining the one you have. I think the beauty of a secondhand book is that the life you are observing isn’t just in the lines, but in the physical appearance of the thing itself. I hope that when I decide my library is overflowing, I will take my books to the store twenty minutes away from home and offer to sell them—whether it is the same store or one in a new city is no matter. And I hope some inquisitive reader with the same disposition as mine wonders whether I love what I’ve passed down.
Even now, I can assure them that I do.