I looked through my journal
entries for 2001 to see how many words I devoted to the
closing of Olde Port Bookshop. I found two entries:
this
one and this
one. I've already devoted
more words to the closing of AVH, which I only visited a
few times a year, than to Olde Port, which I visited two
or three times a week. I may have missed a few entries in
my search but the gist of it is that except for the day
midway through the half-price sell off when
Wife-of-Phil-Person-of-Domino blamed me for not spending
enough to keep them in business (that's this
one) I felt no guilt, only
a sense of loss.
Losing Olde Port, which Nancy
described as my portal to 19th century New England, was a
much bigger deal to me than the closing of AVH. I still
miss it. I still talk about it. I still visit Domino, now
known as Dust Jacket (DJ for short) who is now on her
third bookstore (Artists
and Authors). I have no
such personal relationship with AVH, so why the
guilt?
And this bookstore thing is clearly
affecting my subconscious because I had a succession of
dreams last night that made me wake up wondering how on
earth my whole life could be flashing before my eyes when
as far as I know I'm not dying. I had vivid images of the
house we lived in until I was thirteen with its steep
driveway and dusty back yard. And it went on like that
with scenes from my first job, from Red Sox games of the
1950s, from camping trips to Otter River and Fearings
Pond, even from things I know I saw on the news and not
in person like the events of 1968. Oddly, it continued
when I went back to sleep, but with more recent stuff
like a very detailed memory of eating lunch at the
alternative restaurant in Xiangshan with Carol and having
the people at the next table offer us some of their
pickled lotus root and an equally detailed memory of
ordering breakfast at the Hotel Primorye dining room in
Vladivostok. It was like I couldn't shut this thing off.
I woke up dizzy dreaming about adjusting to the altitude
in Lhasa. If this is some kind of nostalgia, it's a very
curious kind. It's almost like my subconscious was trying
to convince me I've had a life even though civilzation is
ending.
Come to think of it, civilization
has been ending during my entire lifetime! Growing up
there was the threat of mutually assured destruction,
followed by "the sixties" (which many people regarded as
the end of civilization though I'm not sure why),
followed by the greed years (actually I may be the only
one who thought junk bonds posed a threat to civilization
as we know it), the plague years, globalization... the
beat goes on. The Internet struck some philosophers as
the end of civilization as far back as the 1980's. Not
only that, but western civilization has already ended
several times over the course of human history but
there's always been some kind of Lindisfarne with monks
scribbling away to copy the great books and save western
civilization for its next incarnation. Eastern
civilization seems to have had more continuity, but I
don't think it's used bookstores that kept it alive. And,
of course, many great civilizations (Aztecs, Mayas, the
Chaco Canyon people...) are known to us only thru
archeology. The world went on. The world will go on. This
has been a message from the subconscious of war, famine,
pestilence, and death and their horse, Flicka. Now back
to our regulary scheduled rain delay format already in
progress.
