Book Launch

I have been tumbling lately through thoughts of everything but optimism. I calculate invisible money, I worry about what’s to come next like a fourth year student desperately studying for entrance exams she doesn’t even want to write. I can’t fall asleep for the options doing summersaults in my under worked, mundane-fearing brain, and manage to convince myself that my life has indeed become shrouded in darkness and that I, in fact, belong nowhere and the world must surely be ending after this latest of plans. Considering there are no further plans, and the opposite of something is nothing, what else is one to conclude? And then tonight, for just a moment in time, time that for me has ceased to be measured in anything but moments, and certainly not in the scientific units of days and months that lie and steal and otherwise misuse my trust – tonight there was a book launch.

I sat on the floor of a store that might have been Chapters or Coles, except for the fact that it is independently owned and only five exist, and only in this city. I watched as a nervous man read passages from a novel with a slight middle-eastern accent, stopping to explain what his intentions were for the symbolism, characters, and odd collection of ideas and facts that took him four years to assimilate, asking at intervals for approval of his performance. He spoke about a house that represents the body, a perfume factory the soul. The Taliban torments his characters, who come together by chance, in this house, next to this perfume factory, to work out their different problems among stacks of banned books nailed to the ceiling by a woman who must have gone mad. My mind wandered, as it did through every university lecture, without the aid of visual stimulation. Instead, I allowed the titles of the books around me to play tag and hopscotch in my mind, aligning inappropriate taglines to put under Barack Obama’s face and daydreaming about the lives of authors I’ve yet to read. Must it always be about me up there?

At the front of the assembly of 30 or so people, the young author begins to address questions. As he discusses his writing strategies, the story of his first trip back to Afghanistan (which was not until he had written the first copy of the story, so as to conduct a personal experiment in stereotyping and cultural assumptions) and the problem solving that is behind true story telling, I see a different character emerge. He is no longer timid but confident, creative and brilliant and completely in control. As I watch this transformation, as details of his life are slowly revealed, I am reminded of every really good conversation I have ever had.

An aside. I read Vonnegut for the first time yesterday (A Man Without a Country) and he speaks at one point about the value of art, despite his parents’ survival of the depression and subsequent pleas that he choose something more practical. Art is a very human way, he whispered directly in my ear, to make life more bearable. It grows the soul, no matter how badly it is done.

Among other things, both of these authors so recently brought to my attention, and with very little else in common, tread none too lightly on things political. On a world where a fossil fuel addiction is about to be forced into a cold turkey surrender and those in power commit heinous crimes to get their hands on every remaining ‘hit’. On a world where the opposition leaders want nothing more than for the rest of us to group all Muslims under one fundamentalist umbrella, and so many are quick to oblige. For the first time I am spending serious time in an English speaking country that isn’t mine and the exact same issues are infinitely discussed. I can remember so often asking myself in high school what it must have felt like to have been cooking dinner during an occupation, studying for exams amidst bombs, reading in the park while people a few fake, man-made lines away get their heads chopped off. This is it. We all live in the same world.

The point? I felt alive again and my blood ran hot one minute and cold the next, and perspective seeped into my pointless existence once again for those fascinating bookstore minutes. I have been worried over here in my tiny little space at this next of oh so many plateaus of indecision about what to do, where to be, how to get there. But I bring you to life, I argued with myself, and surely not the other way around.

I write, Nadeem Aslam told us (though not in these words), because time passes no matter what, and even if you think you have escaped a moment, a time period, an era, whether through depression or illness or denial or insanity or guilt or real and true happiness, you may think you have lived one way but in fact, and this I shall show you in these precious pages, you have lived entirely another.

There, sitting on the floor, I wondered to myself whether the realization that I have never regretted entering a bookstore is true. I decide it is, and will forever be remembered as so.