Story: An Afternoon At The Strand

The Strand Bookstore. A grid of contained chaos, designed for easy navigation and astonishment. Enter and instantly the layout makes sense, that which can be seen projecting that which cannot. From just one viewable sector is created a whole city of book-streets, each walled by climbing buildings of pages, all planned around an unavoidable and supposedly microcosmic display of focused attention, laminated words, and must-see attractions – that invariably turns out to be so much ephemeral light and sound.

Display Table, it reads on the largest sign of them all, a useless sign, really, because who does not know why these books have been gathered there? A paradoxical place if one ever existed, inextricable from its hometown and yet unrepresentative to the last recommendation (that ends, of course, in a single exclamation mark suggestive of profuseness nonetheless). Why are we drawn and repulsed by these places? Understand this trap, understand its capacity for exposure, a single word simultaneously contradictory. Tap fingers on its glossiness in a faintly disdainful manner, laugh enthusiastically, shuffle, or – it doesn’t matter; under a microscope, all natural behaviors become only interchangeable acts.

Aisles. Is it any wonder, then, that we flee to the alleys like Schrödinger’s cats, shaken and fiercely protective of a single letter, I? Like cemeteries but unlike graves, the lonely aisles are populated only with conclusive specters, people who have chosen, arranged, dressed, pared, and only then said, this is what I am, and then given themselves up completely to our purview, heedless of our capacity for distortion. These, after all, are the solitary tyrannies of book-writers and book-readers; a word written according to one understanding, unchangeable, and a word read according to one understanding, unchangeable, the same word meaning to bridge and meaning to divide. Why do we go to the aisles in The Strand? To seek the common understanding, clearly labeled, of ghosts, and therefore to be alone among friends. When someone asks you, “Did you like it?”, you will understand that mingling of communion and possessiveness. Why else do we really say, “Yes, I liked it”, except to keep our feelings to ourselves? Why else do we keep asking, “Yes! Didn’t you like the part where… and the part where… and the part where…”, except to eventually say, “Well, I…”?

Clear plastic passports, however, always beckon people to them. In The Strand they hang from the necks of employees, but they hang, too, like auras around groups of people, intangible but unmistakable, betrayed by a shared look, a simultaneous smile at objects meaningless to others. People alone in the aisles look longingly on, but what they crave is not the immediate companionship; what they crave is the history. The Strand employees must know this. When they laugh at something that happened yesterday, when they remember that time, an impenetrable barrier flows out from them, and the employee pass becomes a passport to lands impassable to foreigners, similar to those that hang around friends, but with one difference – these are graspable items, achievable, attainable. They are not dependent on the blind groping of likes and dislikes that constitute the messy morasses of relationships; they are in’s designed to be in’s.

Black and white photos, adorning the stairways. Are they not the ultimate goal of all relationships? They prove a common history for those within them (Man. How long ago was this?...). They shut out outsiders (Where did you guys take this?...). They permit us our solitude in our individual remembrances of the events they portray (No! It was like this…). They exist between reality and artificiality (Now, act natural…). But most importantly, they project entire pasts and futures. Neither may exist, but where lies the difference between knowledge and existence?