Chapter 1 

A cold, wintry day in spring. The huge dim cavern of the bookstore: Employee behind the desk quietly going over some papers, another on the telephone. It's early in the morning and few people are browsing. A few have come in from the rain. A man appears at the door with a box in his arms and inquires if he can sell his books. The clerk points his finger toward a door down the otherside of the quiet booklined store and mentions a Mr. Sware as the man to see. The young man feels self-conscious about carrying an armful of books. Old, favorite volumes and dust collectors are packed neatly into the box. He steps into the door and into a small room that looks more like a workshop or a shipping and receiving room: Tape, stamp instruments, boxes, shelves of books are all around. Mr. Sware is standing by the table looking over a sheet of paper. A younger man in overalls is by his side. They look up to see the young man with the box.

- Do you buy books? he asks.

- We buy books. What do you have? Take them out of the box.

The young man puts the box on the table and begins to take the volumes out, one by one, and puts them on the table, reads each title and examines it, feels a bit sad as the titles pass him, relives each one in the moment it passes his eyes; the adventures and pleasant conversations that pass his hands and, still, calculating how much he'll get in return.

The buyer picks each book up and flips through them to see their general condition. He makes two piles, quickly. The young man wonders how he makes his decision. He accepts all the books but the textbooks and the young man lays them back into the box. The buyer looks at the young man. He has sandy, whitish hair growing short and wild over his huge head. He jokes with the employee for a moment and turns to see if the young man has caught the joke. Suddenly, he slaps the top of the books.

- Seventy-five for the whole bunch.

And then he leaves the room after signing a remittance slip the young man can cash in at the front.

The young man is filled with shame and anxiety as though he's committed a huge sin. He gets the feeling that the bookseller is offended by the people who bring down books to sell. Off the street, as it were. And for a full minute, a lingering moment filled with dust and old, dead books, the young man felt the wrath of resentment.

He thinks, "The gentleness in the faces that pass me by; the innocent vitality and quiet radiance." Children collect on the steps of the library. A young woman asks them, "what do you do in a library?" and the collective shout is, "be quiet!" She is flustered now. "Well, that's not all." Inside, people have come to themselves again and are as familiar to those meeting them as the books on the shelves. Some of the people have re-collected themselves reading the back issues of magazines and wandering all the while if they are not bold enough to attain that simplicity of heart while the evidence of things intrude, pulse, demand around them; laughing maniacally the madness of convulsive abstractions. Even the machines laugh.

He had seen her that day. She had heard an interview on the radio with a fellow who had written a book about the stars and planets. He knew of the person. He used to read hi fine magazine years before and used to wonder whatever happened to him. "When reading one of these books," she said, " you want to take all personal experience, sense experience, intellectual experience, and put them together in a celebration of existence." He had forgotten much. He used to tell himself that he would remember everything. He would trust his unconscious soul so much that anything he came into contact with that had weight and meaning would slip down and hold in the flux and add to meaning. He felt those days coming to an end.

He gave her a book. "It is usually scientists who see the illusion of their discipline and can enter into wider circles of development. Scientists often see the implication of their communal discipline and don't want to produce of lot of despotic automatons and technicians who don't appreciate the gifts they have inherited. In other words, to break the illusions of the scientific ego which is the first task, perhaps the easiest. There is nothing but danger after that."

Anything about the stars interested him. He remembered his reading of the cultural anthropologists like Rozak and Thompson. One had to have or learn a certain kind of freedom in reading the creators of thought and their interpreters; a poetic sensibility and vision that could distinguish the true image and thought from the borrowed image and thought.

"They struggle to free themselves of the provincial environment that at the end they have the same sentiments," he thought to himself. Ambition and greed found their apotheosis without having the character to sustain it. At the top was a homogenous mass laying its palm down over the rest of society.

He wasn't sure it would be better in any other country. "I just want to go somewhere that allows me to do my work. Sometimes the nation of my birth appears to be a weird experiment that old trolls have concocted."

Loneliness, lamentable and inhuman. Fear raised up, pushed out, unbalanced. Myth pursued and now dried up and tasteless.

"Democracy is a poet's dream and a poet's nightmare," he thought.

He saw her as a very shy, weird young woman; bright, troubled, delightful. He was in love with her for a period of time. She described the beginning of the process as one of intense terror; masks ripped, the central organization of the ego threatened and then onward toward visualization techniques of one kind or another.

They talked, then, about the initiations of tribal people.

A little later Rene, a beautiful black woman, strikingly tall, lithesome, with short-cropped hair and a noble, dignified face came back to his desk and began telling him about a plan of hers to recoup her losses from credit card companies. She explained her schemes. She talked very rapidly about a friend of hers who worked at a credit card company and knew the ins and outs of the banking world. She got very excited. Then, she left and later told him that she had a "little old woman," in her mind who advised her; told her things that she shouldn't do and when she did something against "her" wishes "she" went away and then returned to say, "I told you so." Now, apparently this "old woman" had helped her devise the scam on the credit cards. "Are you this fellow?" She said, holding up his nameplate and mispronouncing his name.

David Eide
January 24, 2014