Library Reach

I recently had the pleasure to roam a bookstore. Quite well polished, cosmopolitan even, with many gadgets one could snatch and suggest they’re the cultivated type. A cafe down the hall.

As I sauntered down each aisle, with each patron silently enthralled in whatever chosen, so the shelves grew as bamboo chutes, curved into a canopy and the papers floundered downward. A snowflake origami sprinkling.

If you peaked through each blade, so scrolls came at once into frame, fluttered by the gusts of years, centuries. I could hear the creaks of chairs, the scribbles, and with each flick of wrist the words transformed the nullspace we all floated in. Against the swallowing jetblack, beyond the forming hills, so shuffled some province princesses. Scatters of bloom. The spaced chimes seemed choreographed in each flail.

Here we all are, in the rumble of the metropolis, in the center of economic giants and bankers. Yet with a single step into the bookstore the money turns to paper. The fashion wear seems absurd. A scramble for status conferred, in volumes read and regurgitated, as all previous signals seem to be playground roleplay.

If one reads enough, learns enough, could one, also, retreat into this higher reality?

Then I hear some of the canopy snapping. Self-improvement slams down in front of me, beside Cliffnotes summaries. Building a broken pyramid it continues, as the supposed “classic” masters file in line. A closer inspection at some of my neighboring patrons I sense the discordance, the desperation, however projected.

We may commune with this space, but there’s no bridge to where the titans lurk. Instead one may feel the abandonment, to the point of absurdity, and feel forced to conclude one simply hasn’t devoted enough. That there’s a carefully strewn curriculum to elevate barbarians into princely rulemakers, and you better get started on that. So desperate is the search to find the correct order of words to heal the corroded mind, soul, body, whole world.

Everything ahead of me withers, and the dollarbill guards stand tall and crisp against the folly, blocking all exits. All the product and designer pens, heavy-penny’d, grew to boulders, bled in its own gravity. Condense everyone against the wall, as most suitable for the peasantry.

I understood then; we can only see glimpses of it. No matter how much one read, the gulf surely widens. And as long as one reads, so one may instead only nudge a status, a reader, a sure status marker. Exiting the store in the same silence as the previewer.

Accepting our defected minds I descended the escalators with the hung ceiling artwork and pretty beige to gold interior colors, tiling. And yet through the automatic doors, upon the inner-mall carpet, a stranded book shone in defiance.

When I picked it up, I hoped that it’d finally divulge the way to ascend to the prince. But flipping through the entire bulwark, all pages showed blank.

What else to do, other than take out your pen?