Discovery
Last Thursday, my evening schedule of shops – tea – newspaper – Newsnight was disrupted by a strange dose of curiosity. On a whim, I picked up the key to the garage – which has always been there in a glass dish on the bookshelf – and decided to take a gander.
I was unsurprised to see it half-full of junk, probably left behind by previous tenants: a tattered double mattress, an abandoned headboard, an oval-shaped mirror, an old cabinet. All coated in thick blankets of fur-like dust. And then, turning to return to the flat, three shabby cardboard boxes, stacked on top each other, passed my gaze. I drew closer, and made out the lightly-pencilled word: ‘BOOKS’. Enthused, vitalised, invigorated, I lifted the boxes, shuffled out the garage, staggered upstairs and began to forage.
A lift of the cardboard flaps and it happened at once; the warm, welcoming whiff of age-old paperbacks drifting to the nostrils – a smell veiled in vague, fuzzy, dusty mystery: someone, somewhere, at some time, bought these, thumbed the corners of pages, rested coffee cups on the covers, broke the spines – all this and more, I’m sure – till they were packed in boxes and stowed away while time wore on and age set in; the pages yellowing, the print browning and blurring, the glue binding the pages slowly rotting.
Ovid and Euripides; Montaigne and Machiavelli; Rosseau, Zola, Satre and Camus (the owner evidently with Francophile taste); Nietzsche; Joyce, Kafka, Conrad, James; Henrik Ibsen and Arthur Miller: the texts remain largely readable; the books not so. On opening each work, the waxy pages turn stiffly and do not rest easily. The spines crack and the pages creak – a painful but barely audible sound, not dissimilar to the fuzz between radio stations, or long fingernails scraping across a carpet.
Newsnight remains on television. Newspapers continue to be printed and distributed through the night. The books are back in boxes but rest in the living room. And my radio still crackles faintly in the morning.
