Of Bookstores and Dead Words

Bookstores make me very happy. I think the closest I’ve come to religious ecstasy in the last five years was when I touched the bare stone façade of the soon (oh please soon) to be built five-story Fully Booked branch at Bonifacio High Street. Seeing as how I can spend an entire day lost in their (soon to be paltry) one floor sprawl at Powerplant I can only imagine the delirium of having five stories of text to explore. (Well, not quite accurate. I remember literally getting lost in a nine story ginormous bookstore in London, but one can’t quite enjoy the experience as much when one is constantly being rushed by concerned tour-mates who insist that catching the last bus to your foster home is more important than grabbing the complete Lone Wolf series.)

Still, there have been times that I’ve found myself standing in the non-fiction section, in the midst of row upon row of histories, political analysis and psychological how-tos, written by experts and specialists and experienced practitioners whose curriculum vitas read like novels in themselves… and I wonder. I wonder how such often divergent opinions can be reconciled – and if they can’t, I wonder how I would know which author is wrong… or lying through his teeth. And you’re lucky if there are only two opinions. There are some topics where I genuinely think you could take two books, use them as bookends, and fill-in the remainder with a selection of works which gradually lead from the idea in one, to the idea in the other.

What really saddens me however, are the topics upon which everyone seems to agree. Books that suggest substantially similar solutions to societal ills which everyone would agree call for remedies. They come with historical illustrations, data-mined theories and even at times, outlined plans for change, for improvement, for a better world.

Does anyone read this stuff?

You’d think by the blurbs that people did – and what’s more, that they liked them. But take another batch of words, another piece of literature – take your newspaper, and flip through the pages, not just for a day, but day in and day out… and what do you see? What do you see?

Marx once stated that, "Philosophers have always tried to interpret the world, the point is to change it." The noblest philosophies do no good when not put into action. No matter how large the library, how rich the body of work, the most insightful of words do no good when lying dusty on a shelf… or squatting dead in a heart.