It all started with the fear that I won’t make it in time. And with the endless pleasure. And with the feeling of the object in my hands. When I first discovered bookshops, back when I was doing my military service, I realized I had found a place that was completely familiar and safe. Like a central railway station, where the destinations are countless and the chance of getting lost and ending up somewhere entirely wrong and unknown is high. Their smell had, and still has, a bewitching effect on me, like a hand (a familiar hand) giving me a consoling caress. How many hours did I lose myself in strange (or even commonplace) worlds, following plots or paths of theoretical thought? And every time, the pleasure, even from the badly written books (in my opinion), because these show the brilliance of the well written ones all the more. The fear that I won’t manage to read (and enjoy) everything I think is worthwhile and already exists (not to mention what doesn’t exist yet and will be worthwhile) is constant, and I have learned to live with it. You get used to it the way you get used to a demon that rules your soul, and in the end the two of you end up drinking beers on a bench in a deserted park, joking about what you’ve been through together. But the sweet anxiety of the next step, the next reading that will add one more piece to this mental map, seems so irresistible that I feel withdrawal symptoms. I have addictive tendencies, I know. Addiction doesn’t recognize excess, and creation comes only after mental excess (which sometimes turns into physical excess too). Mapping has to do with an unrecognized human tendency: that people need discovery. Most books don’t tell truths (or new ideas). They simply find new ways (poetic, in the broadest sense) to tell them. I look at the shelves of books and see all the characters and genres leap out and start a frenzied dance, as if a great war had just ended or the pill of immortality had been found (with nobody thinking about what happens next). I see the spines of books and remember what I was like when I read them. Nabokov holds that imagination is based on memory, and perhaps this can be read not as the snake eating its own tail but as the snake spewing out its tail, so that the circle grows. The map of paths grows, the ideas and the ways of presenting them multiply, and the spines of books become street signs on the smooth journey of the imagination. For a long time I had decided that literature was finished for me and that I would read only scientific works. Later I realized I had removed colour and changeability from my perception of the world and replaced them with technical drawings in shades of grey. Now I am indiscriminate.

Absorbed in reading the product label in the quiet supermarket, I didn’t notice the small child who was insistently trying to look at me so as to smile at me.

C.L.