Wise and insightful minds monotonously and repetitively remind us that it is in poor taste to judge a book by its cover. Be that as it may, I have never received counsel against judging an entire city by its book covers, and therefore I will proceed with alacrity to do that. On Tuesday I moved from my home in Pennsylvania to work in San Diego. After my first day of work today, I decided to mosey (as I am wont to do) through downtown. As I was investigated the local temple to the god of materialism (read: Horton Plaza), I providentially came across a bookstore that was going out of business. (n.b. While the closing of bookstores is fortuitous for the poor bibliophile like myself, it is an unnerving sight to stumble upon and undoubtedly bodes very poorly for our future). I naturally jumped at the opportunity simultaneously to investigate the locals’ taste in literature while hoping to snag a bargain or two for myself.
It would not be inaccurate to describe myself as a bookstore snob. When in DC, I had a ranking system of used bookstores more detailed and intricate than that used by the NCAA when determining seeding for March Madness. This system is not to be trifled with, nor is it comprehensible to the uninitiated. However, the condensed and abridged version is both easily grasped and stunningly effective in judging the quality of a bookstore, and the cardinal criterion of quality (one observes my Baptist heritage in the alliterative cadence of that phrase) is this: what is the ratio of books that are more than five hundred years old to the number of mass market paperbacks?
Oh San Diego, how I longed to embrace your Plato and Augustine to myself as a hen embraces her chickens, but you would not! Indeed, I fear that all your writing is in vain, because for all of your printed words, the Golden State is heretofore devoid of a single golden word from the divinely-inspired quill of anyone who trod this humble ball more than a mere one hundred years ago! Indeed, the only exception to this proves the lamentable state of decay into which this one great republic has fallen. The lone herald of the ancients left in print here is Catullus, a sentry all too eager to permit debauchery and licentiousness to pass into the citadel of latin poetry. Perhaps it is a source of consolation for the “romance” novels (for indeed they are “romantic” in the sense of representing the very worst of Rome, that heart of viciousness which even now is not dormant in the souls of man) to have their original Romantic forefather on shelves not far away from their own images of scantly-clad vampires and werewolves, a phenomenon proving that the libido is too often the taskmaster of the imagination, and that when a culture creates boredom out of its own erotomania, it rarely fails to create new sources of titillation. The modern version of this is only quasi-bestial, a subtle enough play to allow millions of parents to foolishly allow their children to consume the rabble and teach them that there is nothing beautiful about words or romance.
Good Christian that I am, I would be remiss if I did not mention that the “religion” section did yield a small nugget of gold. I am the new owner of C.S. Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, the last copy on the shelf (the irrepressible optimist in me wants to believe that there were originally dozens of copies and that my fellow San Diegans were prescient enough to snatch them up quickly and are even now basking in the poetic prose of the English master. But while this find proves the Augustinian maxim that there is good to be found even in the most evil of circumstances, Augustine’s realism counsels me against hoping that I will stumble upon avid readers of the Inklings anytime soon in this city.
Let us therefore hear the conclusion of the matter. When the religion section is devoid of Augustine, Aquinas, or Calvin, and the books therein are outnumbered strongly by the so-called “Self-help” books, we betray ourselves, and like San Diego after the passing of the “marine layer”, the true god we worship is clearly revealed.
No comments:
Post a Comment