When I wake up tired, and make myself some coffee to drink and that doesn't work; then have something to eat and that doesn't work; and take a walk in the street amid the noise and characters and that doesn't work, I go to the superstore and look at books.
Just looking at all those books, all those covers of books, makes me feel better. To think of all those thinkers, known and obscure, who were motivated enough to write things down and arrogant enough to think someone else would want to read them; to think so many publishers considered so many thoughts worth the effort, worth binding and glossing and matting, it's almost enough to restore faith in mankind.
They wait, thousands of percepts made tangible and placed a pantheon of suitors for the seekers like me, the ones who wander into the stores on a sluggish afternoon hoping to strike inspiration, comfort, escape. They all look like college tries. But they are never enough.
I want one of them to speak to me from its place, to draw me in and tell me the answers. I want the author to be someone sage and/or quirky, preferably someone who's been on NPR or won some kind of media recognition for being an undiscovered quirky treasure. The author has to have just the right amount of obscurity, and the book has to start right away. It should seduce me with its cover and then come into focus like a new-old friend; it must hook me from the very first word. It has to take me away, but draw me nearer myself, with a wisdom imparted as naturally as oxygen. It has to tempt me away from the book I'm with in a sort of violent literary adultery.
Sometimes I'm so overwhelmed by the seductiveness of all those books-by the sheer possibility of them-that I make lists of potential contenders. I always have a running list of books that must or ought to read, along with a vague certainty that I'll never make them all, or that choosing the wrong one would be an inadmissible waste of time. Considering my remaining life span and the number of books out there, it's a tense, losing battle.
The superstore seems to imply that the battle is being won, though. Everything is set up to help you find your niche, to happen on a book that happens to be on the promotion roster this month, to make you think you are smart or attentive enough for books that exist on a plane far, far removed from you. Some titles—The Idiot's Guide to Beating the Blues; If Life Is a Game, These Are the Rules: Ten Rules for Being Human; How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day; The Wish List—imply that to buy these titles is to vanquish depression, societal ills, and average intelligence.
It's almost touching, the way these colonies of volumes approximate a sort of egalitarian community, where Marilu Henner and John Irving might conceivably be neighbors, and where Arundhati Roy might find herself placed in a league with Jack Kerouac if the determining bond is having moved any given store employee to place them on the Staff Recommendation shelf, sudden emissaries of a stranger's entire corporate persona. ("Employee: Rhona Comments: Roy has written a great tapestry of family relations identifiable to readers from any corner of the globe.")
These shelves help restore my faith in the naïvete and idealism of American marketers, consumers, and publishing flacks, but they don't really help me cut to the chase here. The process of reading this book has to make me feel healed. I want something that recognizes the promise in me, that brings about a slow, tidelike change—the way people can—in my outlook and the color of air around me. I want something that defines me while bringing me forward, with an affirming wisdom I can share. It should be a companion to all the volumes I've ever read, as well as to my self.
I want the text to be better than food, sex, alcohol, and television. I want it to sate every pore of me, to sharpen my features and smarten my mouth. I want it to sing. I want it to grant me independence from sleep, and routine daily life in general. I want it never to end. I want it to appear, helping me find it even as I'm searching, so that our discovery is mutual and fated. It has to give me a rubric for living, and believing. I want it to make me nine again, when a Beverly Cleary book eradicated noise and simulated a trip, or a nap.
Also, the cover should look cool. I want the jacket to feature a glowing blurb from a major newspaper. The author needs to be good-but weathered-looking in the jacket picture, displaying in his or her sloping, kind eyes the world-weariness that fed such genius onto paper. I want the bio to feature a spouse and a provincial home, to evoke a reality full of details and mystery supporting the fiction, for surely the story would be imaginary even if Nonfiction. The pages should have a comfortable heft and contain text that's broken down, digestible—not to say simplistic—imparting its textured revelations in language that challenges me, but not too much and not right at first.
Sometimes books are so worth discovering that you discover them twice; but nothing has ever made me stop feeling restive. Haruki Murakami's story, "Sleep," once impressed me so much that I ripped it out of the New Yorker and saved it for five years before rediscovering it in a story collection of his that a friend recommended. "Sleep" is about a housewife stricken by an insomnia that stretches for days. The way Murakami writes this story, as well as the others in his book, changed the way I saw life for a little while. His work brings out the surreality, mystery, and ordinariness of living. His characters, though vaguely contemporary and Japanese, transcend cultural or temporal barriers. He made me want to write again.
But "Sleep" is not a long story, and neither are the others in the collection. And I'm afraid to read another work of his for fear it won't live up to my first exposure. Ultimately, anyway, despite the beauty and inspiration of Murakami's writing, it doesn't demystify any of the head-scratchers it poses. So the search continues.
I suppose I could keep reading my favorite books over and over again; I've considered rereading Clarissa, which is both enjoyable and the closest thing to a never-ending book one might find. This seems like the wrong answer, however. The book I want needs to be a renewable resource. It needs to generate something beyond itself, or it needs never to end.
From the front to the core of the book, I want it to assault me with a thousand points of salience, jumping at me in perspective like a Chinese jack-in-the-box, until the smallest secret in the world is illuminated. I want it to provide fortuitous entry way to a previously hidden society of individuals, as only the quirkiest and wisest people could adequately appreciate the work's quirky wisdom. These siblings of sensibility would emerge as I read, becoming partners in the enjoyment and interpretation of this masterwork, and eventually of life itself, which would henceforth be different. This select group would garner the multifarious benefits of its superrefined taste. We would be shown the follow of our old ways, the errors in our perceptions, how to make reparations, how to savor the new sparkle in our lives. Myths would be dispelled.
I've been hunting this book for years now, in countless blind visits to superstores and independents in cities and suburbs. I've let title after title skate across my vision, watched them accumulate at my table in deposits from other unsatisfied shoppers, watched them join the other failures collected by book workers, who wheel away the detritus like orderlies with gurneys. I meet hundreds of them, forgetting that some of them have already disappointed me, and sometimes I find a sugar pill of a book to walk out with, feeling assuaged and accomplished; or sometimes I sigh and roam gloomily to another store; or—on the worst days—I walk out emptyhanded and emptyheaded (still) as if I'd seen nothing at all.
Every time I return, often after another fallen courtship; and the shop's order and pulpy smell always welcomes me like a quack's apothecary, promising all the solutions, tangible and saleable, but knowing I'll be back.
I wish for someone to tell me the perfect book to read, but realize if I had such a person, I wouldn't need the book. I think maybe somewhere, my favorite forgotten writer is penning my salvation right now, as I stand uncertain on the street, waiting. I consider that it's there, but I just wasn't in the right frame of mind to find it this time. I wonder if it might be out of print, or simply obscure, and might appear for me at some imaginary flea market some last, desperate day in the future. I never doubt, every time I dead-walk into a store, that this book exists. Every time, I attempt some mystical consequence, a mixture of searching and sensing, that's going to uncover an unnamed treasure somewhere in between New Fiction and Art & Architecture. It might be a hardback, it might be a trade paperback. It might be in the person standing next to me. But I never consider that it doesn't exist. And I never find it.