The Bookstore is a Ghost Town (and I’m pining for the peripheral connection of times past)
It’s that time of year when Fall is about to win a thumb war with Summer. We’re lighting up pumpkin-scented candles, decorating for Halloween way too early (like always), and relishing every morning that brings fog and rain. In the past, we’d also speckle this time of year with trips to the bookstore or mall or local shops. We thought we were going in order to purchase something or other. As it turns out, we were going for more than that.
There was a short time in my teen years when I became fairly reclusive. A sorrow was there and things were dim. I’m unsure of which came first, the sorrow or the withdrawal, but either way, the light came back as I routinely forced myself to get out into the world again. Even something as simple as a trip to the post office would add a little more color to life. When I went out into the world, I saw that there were people on the periphery and it got me out of my own head. Just the presence of others in a joined, prosaic experience, was powerful all on its own. I think that is more important than we understand.
Humans are social creatures, even the introverts. We might not all need large parties and loud laughter, but connection is at the core of most of our desires. I wonder if peripheral connection — the kind you get just by walking around other people, strangers even, who are all enjoying the smell of coffee and the low-decibel humming of hushed speech in a bookstore together — is more vital to happiness than we think.
But the stores are becoming ghost towns.
I looked with a little sadness on a sign at the grocery store yesterday. They’ve begun offering grocery delivery for no additional fee. The water is rising and making the oceans around us bigger.
We mostly sit in our homes or offices and connect through our phones using a new and unvetted form of communication that takes the shape of short quips filtered by algorithms bent on keeping our eyes on the screen for as long as possible. Then we order accessories for those phones and keep our doors shut until they arrive by mail.
And no, this is not a story about how I think Amazon is a demon of a company, or about how TikTok is harming communication, or about how I don’t think people should be safe and stay home when sick (or when at risk for becoming so). It’s not a story about how I somehow have figured out which social structures and laws we need to encourage or enact in order to combat the growing trend we have toward becoming physical islands. Humanity changes. That’s life.
Really, it’s just a post about nostalgia and an ode to things I once took for granted. The world will adapt, and I’ll have to adapt with it. I’m just not sure I’m ready for a Ready Player One kind of adaptation. I miss the strangers on the periphery.
Maybe I’ll go to Barnes & Noble today, and I will make fleeting eye contact with one of the other three customers there, each of us conveying in an instant that we’re pining for a time past. There will still be the smell of coffee, and we’ll breathe it in. But the sound will be all but silent.
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