Book-Worm-Hole

I made another one of my increasingly frequent forays into a bookshop yesterday, seeking , as ever, to dissolve the ennui of a now tedious vacation in the please-grope-me smell of fresh paper.

Armed with little more than conspicuously light pockets, i stepped cautiously into the decidedly regal premises, and felt the full force of a dozen 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' hard-bound editions staring me in the face, snickering in all their over-hyped, but i must admit, not wholly undeserved glory.

After this rather inauspicious beginning, i started looking around the vast and immensely complicated labyrinth, stumbling hurriedly past sections entitled Cookery (I've never understood the motivation for buying, leave alone writing, cookbooks) , General Knowledge (whatever that may be), Erotica ( ok, so i sneaked a little peek here), and reached Literature, quietly occupying a little corner, uninhabited but for a Japanese girl feverishly haranguing a shop-attendant for a copy of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club.

Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.

With a half-smile, and afore-mentioned fatalistic utterances, now on my lips, I look up and see a new edition of The Fountainhead, the redesigned cover lily-white and Communist Red,colurs i would have thought hardly appropriate.
Howard Roark, i am sure, laughed.

Jack Kerouac simply sits, in satori-induced stupor, not taking insult, in true Buddhist fashion, at the ignominy of being placed next to Jackie Collins(why are you here ?),and I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Continuing on my merry ride, i spot other masters laid to a dusty rest, Gogol's Dead Souls probably lamenting Sophocles' Tragedies (under 'Greek', you see) , Kawabata and Murakami and Ishiguro and Oe trying manfully to catch the Japanese cutie's attention, Huxley's Doors of Perception leading to Hugo's Hunchback, and so on and on and on in a never-ending rollercoaster through the literary ages.

And after three hours or so , With the customary sigh, i prepared to troop out, Neruda's clouds waving white handkerchiefs of goodbye, my pockets still feeling the same, but my spirit well and truly uplifted, when Scott Fitzgerald, genius of the Jazz Age, chronicler of the 1920s, beckons me one last time, and who am I to refuse?

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Before I die, I want to own a book-shop.