Powell's

Powell's Book Store, Portland

They call it "a city of books" and that's about right. You need a road map to navigate the floors and aisles and seemingly endless ranges of books, new and used. The store employs a clever color-coding system to steer you (for example) to a thousand small-press poetry books, a corner of one floor where I spent an hour in a mind-boggling world dedicated to the printed word. My second hour was spent in the fictional "A's" agog at the many editions of Jane Austen I had never seen before. Then there's a short break in Powell's cafeteria-sized coffee shop--folks carry piles of books to the long communal tables and flip through them as they recover from the overwhelming experience of browsing in this shrine to Logos, the universe of knowledge.

I won't be climbing Mt. Everest or traversing the North Pole in this lifetime, but I have made it a point to visit as many bookstores as possible--my bucket list. In no particular order, these are my favorite places to browse: Haslam's Book Store in St. Petersburg; Fifty-Seventh Street Books in Hyde Park, Chicago; Labyrinth Books on the Upper West Side of New York; The Book Warehouse in Vancouver, BC; Politics and Prose in D.C.; the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, Massachusetts; the Tattered Cover in Denver; and Page One in Albuquerque. There have been others, many of them  dead and gone, Amazoned into oblivion.  And now, at long last, I've visited Powell's--the granddaddy of them all, the Sans Souci of bookstores.

The town where I live--there are half-a-million people--has a stolid Barnes and Noble and a paltry handful of used-book stores. When I arrived here, seventeen years ago, the situation was quite different: there were dozens of bookstores, and my wife and I could spend a relaxing Saturday browsing books on Central Avenue, stopping now and again for a cup of coffee that didn't cost five bucks. No more. The bookstores are gone, replaced by upscale eateries, bars with the charm of airport hangers, and fly-by-night shops whose life expectancy is equal to the attention span of the average consumer.

Traveling this summer, sitting in airports and restaurants in three states and two countries, I wasn't surprised to see that virtually no one reads books in his leisure moments. On airplanes, my fellow passengers flipped through in-flight magazines before watching Netflix on their phones and iPads. In coffee shops smart phones dominate everyone's attention; indeed, it was rare to see a person in her twenties not gazing at a cell phone, whether walking or sitting still, thumbs rapidly twirling out missives to someone glued to his phone. Outside of Powell's--an enclave for the literate that put me in mind of Fahrenheit 451, the book people desperately preserving our written past--one simply did not see a person holding, much less reading, a book.

Our President is proudly illiterate, a Twitterer, a man for whom anything worth saying can be condensed into a telegraphic sentence or two.  He isn't alone. When something happens these days, there ensues a race to comment in a pithy half-sentence--no longer do we have statesmen who ruminate and consider what they think, now the hacks rush to fill the blogosphere with unconsidered opinions. Those who don't have the concentration to engage with a book, to wind their way through a complex narrative or an intricate argument, are unlikely to develop the ability to untangle a momentous problem or to articulate a position that requires their own and their audience's attention.

These unhappy thoughts pressed on me as I leafed through dozens of biographies at Powell's. Lives lived with a purpose beyond self-aggrandizement, lives lived deeply and preserved in a language that isn't designed to be instantly superseded by another jumble of characters, by yet another quip whose shelf life will be no more than one news cycle. I was especially moved by Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich: A Life Remembered for its subtle evocation of a life lived on the perilous edge of a totalitarian regime. A study of the endurance of the mind in the face of mindlessness.

Fascism begins with the conviction that thinking diminishes our effectiveness as actors--fascists privilege the will over the intellect. Ideas are the product of individual cognition and silent meditation. Fascists have no patience for individuals--it is far easier to manipulate a mass of people than a lone individual--nor do fascists see the point of silence when it is far more distracting to fill the air with bluster. Books are an impediment to conformity, and they dull the edge of anger. Burn them, then burn their authors. Or, better still, ignore them. It's remarkably easy to do so.

Leaving Powell's for the last time, I couldn't help but feel both exhilarated and sad. I'd spent more money than I could afford, and I felt thankful that such a marvelous throwback to an earlier era could still exist, and perhaps even thrive, in a country that has abandoned reading for other pursuits.* But I also felt as if Powell's was as much a museum as a store, a monument to a time when reading books was not uncommon, when every town had a bookstore, even if weren't Powell's.

But there's hope. Young people, mostly thanks to the remarkable Ms. Rowling, are reading more than their elders. In 1970, only eight percent of adult Americans hadn't read a single book; that figure is up to twenty-four percent as of 2014. (Another twenty percent of American adults read only a single book per year). But those under fifteen are reading more than in the recent past. May they continue to do so! 

*http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/01/16/a-snapshot-of-reading-in-america-in-2013/

George Ovitt (6/20/17)