I went to a used bookstore in Takadanobaba on Sunday called The Blue Parrot. It’s apparently a pretty well known used English bookstore in Tokyo. A friend of my mine at work mentioned it to me and I finally got around to checking it out. I was lucky to find they were having a half-off sale last weekend. The place is a pretty tiny, cramped space with three aisles of various books. It has a typical small, alternative bookstore, hipster vibe to it. There was a flip-flop wearing clerk with an earring and a middle-aged story-telling bald writer loitering and telling stories for a better part of an hour while the clerk ooh-ed and aah-ed.
I browsed the stacks, which had all the usual book sections: sci-fi, fantasy, classics, general lit, self help, non-fiction, travel, as well as Japanese text books and the like. There’s a 100 yen bargain bin with nothing in it that I wanted. Most books seem to be about 500 yen so I got two for that since there was a sale. There’s some good stuff, but the things that jumped out at me out of the multitude of books were one’s I’ve read already. I ended up getting this old copy of Brave New World from 1936. I like old books much more than new ones because they have a nice lived-in feel. This one has some notes in French. I also got a nice yellow-paged copy of Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It’s an abstract and magical account of his days as an aviator in the French postal service—or so far it is, I’ve only just started.
I used to love a brand new hardcovers with crisp pages and a sexy binding, but as time went on and I got poorer I decided to stop wasting money on new books when a used one reads just the same. Then I found that the used ones read better since the pages are darker and easier on the eyes. I gave up the hardcovers for mass paperbacks since they fit in my pocket and are easily concealed. And nowadays I search for the oldest edition, particularly for sci-fi, as they usually have fantastical covers originally painted by hand (my copy of Solaris has a beautifully surreal depiction of the colloid planet). I also love when an old book has someone’s notes in it, or better yet a dedication. A copy of Siddhartha I own has a note inside the cover. It reads: To Grant, To feel. Love, Barb —dated 1/1/77.
A new book is just a book. But an old book has a life of it’s own to me. It’s not just another copy.
“ Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time? The river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future.
— Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
We sleep in the sing song
windy window rattle of
Tuesday afternoons,
late for class and life
amid used books scattered
half-read and dogeared,
cold pizza and debt.
—as the suns sets in Damascus,
some woman bleeds in Persia,
the colossus sinks into the sea,
we write dissertations
on bud brewed chai:
honey sweetened
jasmine spiced
earthly melange
—we ponder the beginning,
in Africa-ca-ca-ca....
the first dustings of
monkey perception
rising from the valley.
“ We are Tomte. The Scandinavian region of northern Europe is the fabled home of gnomes called Tomte. Tomte love children. At night. When everyone is sound asleep. Tomte go about casting magical spells to ensure the next morning’s freshly baked bread will be especially delicious for the children. Cherishing the spirit of Tomte, we at “Hokuo” take a highly skilled and gentle-natured approach to bread making.
— I frequent a bakery in Shinjuku station. This slogan is written on their shopping bags.
I’ve been strangely unreasonable to myself lately. I have neglected my passions to the point that that they are no longer my passions. I seldom write. Never poetry. I don’t take photos. I no longer work on digital media. I was never any good at these things but I did them anyway. Now I just work at an unfulfilling [this is not a word—it should be] job. My personal relationships are lying dormant. I no longer keep in contact with old friends. I seldom speak with current ones. I interact the most with work friends. I don’t dislike them. They are good people. A few of them are great people. But when I am with them I am at work. We talk about work. I teach at a conversational English school in Tokyo—an ‘Eikaiwa’. You could scoff at my using the word ‘teach’ if you like. My life has begun to revolve more and more around this one dismal aspect. The star that is my mind more and more rapidly circles this vapid black hole.
Would I feel this way about some other line of work? Or is that one’s job has a tendency to eclipse everything else. I don’t know how to break out of this. I don’t actually work that much. Some of my students work ten or twelve hours a day and I cringe at the thought of their lives. But they don’t seem like broken ghosts—though maybe they hide it well. Maybe I employ this facade as well, though I am unaware of it myself. I finished reading Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow. It left me with a nice feeling of intellectual stimulation. A tiny lasting high that churns the gray matter. It was the most morally perfectionistic kind of information exchange—one of enlightened agreement. It’s that moment when you have some thought that you’ve cultivated carefully and obsessively over years—over a lifetime—and you find it somewhere else long predating your own moment of understanding.
Masamune wrote about the need for diversity in order to survive catastrophe. But he wrote it on the order of universes, not species or individuals. He spoke of memes and genes existing because it is the universe is a harbinger of diversity. The data aggregates from the chaos. It crystallizes in the void. These systems grow in complexity as the result of an inherent quality of our reality. The complexity is infinitely increasing. Or as Masamune put it, “intelligence increases to infiniti,” or something like that. Of course I didn’t think these things verbatim, but I have come to conclusions around those lines. (Though ‘conclusions’ is a misnomer—no thought is a conclusion but rather a process leading to another thought.) I’m not trying to brag or show off my brains. I didn’t come up with these ideas spontaneously. They emerged from the primeval information soup that is our civilization. As I read the last pages, and I closed in on the final ideas, I felt a blissful oneness as a result of this connection. The information has come full circle and it continues onward.
That felt really really good. Cerebral vomit. Gotta sleep so I could work. Peace.
