A New Renaissance: The 'Haunting' Bookshop
'Ghosts' of the past tell tales, and teach lessons in this true personal story of discovery and rebirth, prompted by an accidental visit to an old bookshop.
In my early twenties I experienced a fresh discovery in an unexpected sort of way. The experience not only brought me through a portal to a new economy of personal expression, but also a new way of seeing the world around me.
Lonesome Boulevard
Sad and lonely after my girlfriend at the time had left for the Midwest to return to school, I wandered the streets late on a Friday night, looking for a bit of solace in a few moments of urban solitude. I enjoy a walk when I need to ponder, reflect or process. I especially like walking at night when the world is more quiet and still, and just alive enough to be interesting enough to be in the midst of for a while.
Along a side street I came across an old book store that I’d never noticed, despite being in that part of town a few times before. An old, dusty place that looked like a character in a Chris Morley story. Maybe not a haunted bookshop, but haunting for sure.
“Well this should be interesting!”
Old News
When I walked in, the creak of the hinges that held the weathered wood and glass door, and the “ding-a-ling” of the bell that it slapped as it opened confirmed that I was stepping into something old—something that defies our time by standing steadily in its own.
“And me, leaving the house without my derby!
The place was definitely dusty. The owner was dustier, with a half-folded newspaper in one hand, which he read while sipping from a teacup in the other. Kind of late in the day for a newspaper!
“That’s old news now.” I said, teasingly gesturing toward the newspaper. He bested me with “Older than you!”
He unfolded the paper revealing the cover page; an issue of the Daily News from 1955. The Brooklyn Dodgers had made history that year by winning their first World Series, beating the New York Yankees 2-0 in game seven, which was a monumental achievement for the Dodgers. The paper celebrated the victory on their front page with the headline “Who’s a Bum!”—kind of a nod to the team’s nickname, the “Bums.” It was a major point of pride for Brooklyn in ‘55, and even ‘in my day’ it still lingered and resonated in Brooklyn culture and lore.
Why he was reading that issue that night, and why on earth he had this gem from ‘55 folded like yesterday’s news is a story for another time.
The Bookshop
“Every detail was beautiful and precise—even the details you wouldn’t expect someone to ever notice or care about…”
As the conversation with the shop owner faded, my attention drifted to the rows of bookcases that called out to me like a familiar blanket. Down two narrow steps, just beyond a worn Persian rug, my adventure continued.
This was definitely a used bookstore. There were no new titles—or new books—but the shelves were organized and filled with both history and history books, as well as philosophy, religion, linguistics, classical literature, and poetry. You didn’t buy books there, you bought a snapshot of the legacy of the culture and knowledge of man.
I browsed around a bit, at first admiring the old shop and the interior of its design and construction, more than the volumes on the shelves. It was all real! Real wood, everywhere. Real Wainscoting along the walls. Those walls were real, too. Solid plaster, not drywall. High ceilings with ornate tin paneling capped this museum of old-time artisanship. Cove molding joined the walls and the ceiling, and wood carved cherubs watched over me from the corners.
Every detail was beautiful and precise—even the details you wouldn’t expect someone to ever notice or care about.
“This place! This was when people still gave a damn…About everything.”
Chapter Markers
Eventually I started to pay more attention to the books than the shop. Many of them were bound in that old-days way when cloth binding was considered more affordable than more traditional leather, but was still more elegant and tasteful than what we do today in most hardcovers
I wondered about the many hands that held these books, and the persons who read from their pages. Each book seemed like a keeper of secrets of many, many readers past. Real story tellers. They might tell you who first held this copy of Wuthering Heights or the highlights of that reader’s life, during the time it took them to come to “The end”?
Was this copy of Huckleberry Finn some young boy’s escape to adventure from the boredom—or hardships—of his real life? “What did you see in his face,” I’d ask “as he came to your most exciting pages? Excitement? Surprise? Joy?”
Now, on to the Poetry section.
Poetry was less familiar to me than literature. In English classes throughout my schooling we’d only briefly covered poetry. Enough to discover it, but not enough to really explore and appreciate it. As an adult, it was a world of mystery to me so I thought a brief traversal though these shelves would be a more refreshing distraction from my melancholy mood.
It should have been lost in that sea of book spines on that shelf but it somehow jumped out from the shelf…
The section was a single bookcase of about eight or nine shelves. I was surprised there was so much poetry in circulation, the shelves were so populated. Scanning across the weighty shelves, I came across the most nondescript binding you’ve ever never-seen. It should have been lost in that sea of book spines on that shelf but it somehow jumped out from the shelf, as if it was the only book there. Or the only one intended for me.
It was the Complete Works of William Wordsworth.
“I’ve heard of this guy!”
I drew the volume from the shelf, like calling Lazarus out of that tomb, and began to put it to the test. The first test of a worthy book was the smell test. Does this smell like a print shop, or does it smell like it escaped the Titanic?
“Titanic!”
Should I be grossed out by that smell? Is that mold or just a harmless ‘musty’ smell? I dunno, to me it smells like time and wisdom. It smells like a forgotten world, to the great loss of all civilization. I love the smell of old books—even if they aren’t old by time, but just old by use, and exposure to the world.
Smell test: Passed! Next test, the hunt. This consisted of fanning through the pages while counting a random number, and seeing if what I read on the page I landed on intrigued me enough to want to read more of it. For “The Completed Works…” I think I went with the number seven. Don’t ask me why I remember that.
I shut my eyes, fanned through the pages starting from the back of the book, while calmly counting to seven. When I opened my eyes again I happened to be looking toward one of those cherubs in the corner on the ceiling; its tiny, pudgy hand appearing to point toward the book I was holding, as if to say with excitement “That’s the one!”
I looked down and saw that I had landed on “The World is Too Much With us”.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”
“We have given our hearts away!”
I don’t know why that so struck me. The world, too much with us. And we, poor ‘we’, who have given our hearts away. I felt like I deeply understood it, and yet I had no idea. I knew it, and knew not why, like a lullaby I’d met again, many long years later.
I didn’t know the poem. I couldn’t explain it at the time, but somehow I knew what it was saying to me. It happens with poetry, I’ve learned. There’s something spiritual and transcendent about it that we recognize its voice even if we don’t yet understand its language.
“I’ll take it!” I thought. Though as I closed the book and felt its binding between my palms, it felt like it was already mine.
I checked out and took a last look at the bookshop before I left it. I had to take it in and appreciate the beauty of the humanity that went into everything in it. Every craftsman, artist, author, poet left something of themselves there. What they created carried a resonance of their dignity — like an echo revealing the voice behind it; an image of who they were, casting an accusing shadow over the present in unspoken indictment of modern man. “You have given our hearts away, trading the real and the true for the false, synthetic and vulgar.”
‘Head-ing’ Home
“If our present is ever put on trial by our legacy, we’d be found guilty…”
While waiting at a bus stop I read The World is Too Much With Us, again and again, thinking about the world and time I was living in. I couldn’t shake the sense that, for all we appear to have gained, we’ve really lost something essential—something vital—in our modern age. If our present is ever put on trial by our legacy, we’d be found guilty of at least one fundamental crime—forgetting. We’ve forgotten who we are, how to be and how to truly live and express the dignity God gave us. We’ve forgotten our heritage; lost our soul and squandered the inheritance left to us by generations that came before us. And so what we do, how we live, and what we create today tells the future generations that we don’t care, have no self-respect, prefer the sensual to the Good, the efficient to the Beautiful, and love neither God, or our fellowman. Show me a creation, and I can tell you about the creator. What will the future come to know about us, from the biographies ghostwritten by the detritus of our culture?
But there’s hope. we aren’t forced to live this way. We can choose to live another way and to be better. That bookshop was more than it seemed. It was a sanctuary and a beacon calling its visitors to remember what has been lost and forgotten. That remembrance can either accuse us—confronting our failure to live up to the dignity of those who came before—or inspire us to strive for something better than what we’re doing. Either way, it urges us to remember who we are, to reclaim forgotten dignity and our collective soul, and to orient our lives and work toward the transcendent; the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
Words Worth a Lot
Here’s my interpretation of the rest of “The World is Too Much With Us” by Wordsworth, after many reads and a lot of pondering.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not
Out of tune! We’re moving too quickly, in too much of a rush to receive what God is sharing with us in the beauty and dynamism of the natural world. We don’t feel the rain, we just get wet. We don’t stop to watch the movement or formation of the clouds, we don’t see how God paints the sky. Really what we see there is something to post to Instagram where the artistry is killed, but lasts forever like a frog in formaldehyde. The artistry consists in the lived moment, not just in the art.
…Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
Would it be better to be a pagan raised on old mythology than be a part of our spiritually disconnected modern world? Though Wordsworth recognized paganism to be “a creed outworn” (obsolete beliefs) he contemplates whether that would be preferable, since the ancient pagans at least had a deep connection to nature.
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
Maybe if he were standing in a meadow (“lea”) he might feel less lonely and spiritually lost, because he’d perhaps find God at least in nature.
My discovery of Wordsworth’s poetry led me to other romantics like Coleridge, Tennyson, and eventually other poets. For a time I wrote a bit of poetry, too. I was so animated by the works of these masters. Maybe a little too much, because when I look back on those poems now I see some pretense in them. But I wasn’t trying to imitate the masters so much as honor them. I was deeply inspired by them and I wanted to mirror the style of their prose; to bring it forward, the way that crowded bookshelf did for me that night.
Would you like to see what this episode in my life inspired? Let me close this piece by sharing one of my first poems with you.
Judge me kindly, dear reader. What you’re about to read was written by a starstruck kid who knew what he loved, but didn’t know what he was doing. I was tempted to revise this poem, but I decided to let it be ‘who’ it is—the good, the bad, the flaws and all. It’s honest, if nothing else. It tells the truth (what I wanted to say) , and tells it in Truth (the way I was able to say it). I feel like changing it would be a vulgarity. I hope you enjoy it.
I called this one “New Renaissance”
All at once, some day, we’ll ask ourselves 'Whatever became Of all the arts that soothed our smarts Yet fell off all the same?'
While all the while we nourish Mindless things for all we can. And dare to lable ugliness As some masterpiece of man
What has Art become today But money, filth and greed? Yet there is hope Resounding hope And some might even say The world's false prophets follow While God’s true artists lead.
And art will live within the hearts Of those few it may choose Be born again in their works Their lives, the paths they choose
And in some distant day we’ll ask ourselves 'Whatever became Of all man’s wrecked, failed intellect Which Art revived again?'
I’d love to know what you thought of this. Consider leaving a comment and letting me know. And if you enjoyed this even a little, please show it by tapping “Like” and/or sharing it. It helps my distribution.
This is interesting. Do you have more work anywhere online that I could read? (Forgive me if I'm addressing a famous author, I plead ignorance about a lot going on these days.)
Here is my ‘critique’ for your edification.
As I mentioned before, I waited until after you posted the Voice-Over, and I’m glad I did. First, I’m a speed-reader, and it really wouldn’t have done it justice to speed-read this piece. I would have skimmed over a lot of good little details. Second, I enjoyed hearing it in your voice, as it is always hard to read a piece that has a lot of internal monologue.
Example,
“Well this should be interesting!”
and
“And me, leaving the house without my derby!
I don’t automatically read that as something the narrator says. But I heard it properly in the audio version.
As for syntax & grammar, I won’t get into that much, except to mention one tip. Always watch for repeated words and eliminate, if you can. Example,
"and just alive enough to be interesting enough"
It looks weird to see the same word repeated. Instead, try,
"and just alive enough to be sufficiently interesting"
But I’m sure you really want to know how the whole piece landed. It was a piece that started out as a personal anecdote about a book shop, but developed into a story about the narrator and about our modern world, and ended with poem, and that is a difficult thing to stitch together, but I think it worked. It revealed a lot about you that I wouldn’t see in your other posts. Some of these lines are real gold, like this one
“You didn’t buy books there, you bought a snapshot of the legacy of the culture and knowledge of man.”
It also struck me in several ways, personally. Example,
“Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;”
that made me chuckle because Proteus is the name of the main character in my first book, Into the Fifth World!
But the piece really overlapped with what I’m researching right now, and this research will probably end up becoming a full book. In this line —
“Would it be better to be a pagan raised on old mythology than be a part of our spiritually disconnected modern world?”
I would answer Yes. Yes, it was better in the ancient pagan societies because they were virtuous out of necessity. It was for survival of the society, not simply because someone made up an arbitrary rule. And today, because survival is presumed, some tend to think that virtues are, as I said, simply arbitrary rules rather than necessities for survival.
And I place the blame at the Reformation, although it took a few centuries for the full decline to unravel … the Enlightenment, then Evolution, then Marxism, then Progressivism, finally contraception & divorce. A lot of people blame modern technology only, but the loss of virtue happened before then.
Anyway, that’s my thesis I’m working on, and your piece overlapped into a lot of similar themes.
“We have given our hearts away!”
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
And your poem at the end, it really captured a sense of optimism of a return to the kind of appreciation of the good, true and beautiful that will return once we recognize and undo the errors rooted in the Reformation. That’s my task ahead for later this year.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a sudden urge to go out and buy a derby!