Listening to Books
When you've worked at a bookstore for a while, strange things start to happen.
The other day, I was going through the store, just ordering the shelves, putting books back in their places, straightening out the shelves. All of a sudden, the combined literary weight of hundreds of thousands of books hit me square in the solar plexus. I looked around me.
Every single one of those books contained someone's hard-earned ideas. Every one contained dozens, if not hundreds of stories of what it means to be human.
I looked at the shelves, astonished that the weight of humanity wasn't snapping them, sending thousands of books cascading down onto the floor in an eruption of dust and paper.
There is something that happens almost daily at the store: A customer will walk in the door, take a deep whiff and exclaim: "The smell of old books!" If you've ever been in a used book store, you know the smell of books. It's very powerful, and most people have positive associations with it. But did you know that books also make a sound?
On that certain day, when I had my epiphany while shelving, I closed my eyes and listened to the books. There, at the very edge of perception, far below the din of the street, the squeeky shoes of patrons, the muffled punk music coming from the up-stairs apartment, there was a little tiny voice. The tiny voice of thousands of books calling out. You can only hear it because they all call out the same thing.
I thought about this for a second. Yes, it was true: all these thousands of books all have the same thing to say. Millions of stories in different permutations of characters, situations, settings, complexity and style, but every single one has the same underlying message. I strained harder to hear what it was.
I couldn't quite make it out. I'll keep listening.
