"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Archives for posts with tag: books
His characters—men with importunate appetites and unfortunate habits of deception—are uneasily suspended between the desire for love and the impulse towards flight.
… is anything but, and isn’t a love story.
I returned to the harbor, dejected and bewildered. No sooner had I seen my ship than I beheld what the struggles and hopes of my journeys had kept from my notice. I cried out.
The waves of the sea had washed the paint from the sides of my ship, leaving naught but bleached bones.
The winds and the gales and the heat of the sun had erased the figures from the sails, leaving them like worn and ash-colored clothes.
I had gathered the curiosities and treasures of the earth into an ark floating upon the face of the waters. I had returned to my people, but they spurned me because their eyes beheld only the external.
In that hour I abandoned the ship of my thought and went to the city of the dead. I sat among the whitewashed tombs, thinking of their secrets.
—pp 63, The Storm: Stories and Prose Poems, Khalil Gibran
I was stuffing a fistful of change into my wallet when I realized the man queueing behind me was trying to get my attention, his raised eyebrows asking the question I could see him mouthing but could not hear above the music being pumped into my ears.
“… did you find this?” was all I caught as I took one earbud off.
He pointed to the book I had just paid for. With its title in large white type against a bold red background, the simple but striking cover jacket was the kind of shiny object that would catch the eye of the bibliophilic magpie in me; it would seem it had caught his as well.
Minutes ago, I had stood before one of the many columns of books in that cramped bookstore, browsing for nothing in particular. Despite the presence of well-meaning small plastic tags, each declaring a different category, the books were randomly stacked, the only link from one to the next being the similarity in the length of their spines. Surveying the mess, it was clear the owner of the bookstore was no book lover, or was one whose love for them had been worn off long ago by the hardship of keeping his ten-year-old store afloat in business. It was on that thought that I had glanced in the direction of the register, and, in doing so, had spotted the book.
“This is a good book,” the man in the queue said. I smiled and agreed.
He was about forty, bespectacled and just a bit on the portly side; blue striped shirtsleeves and dark gray trousers; a leather laptop bag, suitably executive in both style and color. He gestured towards the book. I passed it over. He thumbed through a couple of pages and nodded, the corners of his mouth solemnly turned down. When he spoke again, his accent confirmed my guess that his flag was of the same colors as those of the book cover.
“Where did you find this?”
“Over there. On that shelf.”
“You are very smart,” the salaryman said, the half smile on his face carrying his disappointment at not having found the book first. He closed the book, took a last look at the bright yellow $9.90 price tag on its cover, and handed the book over in a conceding gesture, as though we were contestants in some episode of Survivor: The Bookstore and that I had beaten him to the winning find.
Then, as if he was thinking the same and realizing the absurdity of the thought, the salaryman joined me in grinning, a fellow magpie pleased at a good steal, even if it was not his victory.
When digging through bargain bins, perseverance is key. Just as it is with everything else in life, eventually you will find that needle in the hay stack.
Because I love diversity.
See the covers here.
About
34, male and very Cancerian. Often irascible, even if he is prescient to his emotions. Lives for the resonance of beautiful passages, cinematic magic and aural bliss. Dabbles in fiction writing, photography, sketching and daydreaming in his free time, even though he is paid to do just those in a professional capacity.
He is, in other words, quite a geek.
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