Contemplating Mortality
“This is such a brush with mortality, difficult to parse at 14.”
So said the father of a 14-year-old boy who shared with his son one of the last helicopter tours of New York City before that helicopter plunged into the Hudson River this past week, killing a Spanish couple, their three young children, and the helicopter’s pilot. Earlier news stories have described the crash itself; this article in the New York Times describes the reactions of families who toured the city in that helicopter shortly before the fatal crash.
There are moments like this one when people are fully aware of just how close they are to death. Sean Carroll begins his book A Series of Fortunate Events with the story of a man who narrowly missed his flight one September morning, only to learn a bit later in the morning that the flight he intended to take was one of those flown into the World Trade Center. Many of us are aware that if circumstances had been just slightly different on a particular day, we or someone close to us would have died. Such moments bring to mind just how fragile and precious life is. But most of us, most of the time, manage to feel ourselves distant from our mortality.
Actually, that’s simply not true for many people in the world. Many people confront concretely and every day the stark evidence of mortality: Will tomorrow be the day when a young child finally succumbs to starvation? Will this afternoon be the time that a missile or drone falls on this apartment building rather than the one down the street? Will one die next week from an easily cured disease simply because one lacks access to medical care?
Many of us, much of the time, are rather removed from those challenges. I’m thinking now about the challenge of mortality itself: how does one live in the face of the realization that life is short, even for those who manage to avoid living the nasty and brutish life suffered by many others?
I would begin by emphasizing the importance of empathy.
Click to read a brief tangent about Elon Musk and Donald Trump on empathy.
I know that Elon Musk and others say that empathy is civilizationally suicidal, and that view seems to inform the actions of the administration that Musk is currently serving. As the linked article goes on to point out, “Whether Trump succeeds or fails in his quest to remake US society is very much a question of how much of the pain of others Americans are willing to abide in the pursuit of making America great again.” It seems to me that we don’t yet know the answer to that question. And that part of coming to that answer turns in part on just what “great” means.
David Hume and other philosophers have argued that empathy is at the root of moral judgment, but I’m not focused on moral judgment here; instead, I’m suggesting that empathy opens the door to a deeper understanding of and stance in response to our mortality. Even those of us who are fortunate enough not to see immediate and direct challenges to our mortality can get a sense of it by paying attention to the lives of others. Seeing and empathizing with others’ suffering, suffering that signals mortality, pushes us to confront our own. Yes, as the father said, such a confrontation is a heavy lift for a fourteen-year-old. It’s a heavy lift for anyone, especially for those of us privileged enough to avoid thinking of our mortality. But even if we try to ignore it, suffering is a part of life.
“We cannot change human suffering because it is the condition of our existing at all. But we can make it articulate. We can make loss, death, and therefore life, present, discernible, real, and in that way turn something unbearable into something human. That is only possible with others, though; hence the touches, the hands, the quizzical looks, the being together, and the being separate” (Lindsey Stonebridge, We are Free to Change the World, p. 202).
We live our lives more authentically — more humanely — if we acknowledge our mortality and face it directly. And I think we face it most fruitfully if we face it in community.
Treasures of independent bookstores
Saturday’s celebration of Independent Bookstore Day has me thinking about all of independent bookstores who have fed my literary appetite over more than five decades. Perhaps some of them will be familiar to you – I’d love to hear/read from anyone who has spent time in any of these stores. Even better, perhaps you’d be kind enough to point out other stores that one simply must visit the next time one is in a particular city.
I’ve moved around quite a bit in my adult life. Most of the stores celebrated below are in or near what was once my home city. I also discuss a few stores in other cities where I’ve not lived. It’s not at all surprising that some of these stores no longer exist, and, as I admit below, a little embarrassing that I, like many other book lovers, made business difficult for the indie stores that survived and those that didn’t.
I did my PhD in Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University. The school of theology thought it important to provide a good selection of books for seminary and Ph.D. students. To that end, it subsidized an independent bookstore on campus. (As I recall, the administration basically treated the expense as the cost of one Assistant Professor.) The collection included books in all of the different areas of religious studies, but I happen to think that the philosophy and theology collection was particularly strong. I’m allowed to think that because I worked at the store for several years (and even served as interim manager for a semester while the manager was away) and selected many of the books on offer.
Another bookstore in Dallas was the Book Seller (or was it the Bookseller?). I saw it as high-brow, and also more expensive, especially since I didn’t have the employee discount. But it had a very good collection, well organized on dark wood bookshelves, arranged nicely in the carpeted store. Tragically, it went out of business while I was still in school. Not so tragically, they had a going-out-of-business sale that had them marking down the prices of the books remaining on the shelves each day. I remember the deliberations: do I buy this book today at 30% off, or plan instead to buy it tomorrow at 35% off if no one else buys it today?
The used books market in Dallas was anchored by Half Price Books. It wasn’t the monster then that it is now. In fact, they were founded in Dallas not long before I began graduate school; I know that I shopped in their second location; I think I spent time in their first one as well.
After graduate school, we moved to Macon, GA, about 85 miles south of Atlanta. I don’t remember a good bookstore in Macon, though I do remember the sense of excitement among readers when Barnes and Noble opened a branch not too long before we moved away. Our book shopping during our 10 years there was mostly at two Atlanta stores — Oxford Books (no longer in existence) and Charis Books & More. Charis still exists, and proudly claims to be the South’s oldest independent feminist bookstore. (I have to wonder how much competition there is for that honor!) I think that Oxford’s offerings were similar to those of the Book Seller, but the vibe was different – brightly lit, with tiled (or linoleum?) floors. A big entertainment activity for us during our decade in Macon was to drive to Atlanta for dinner and time in one or both of these bookstores. Oxford was much larger than Charis, with a much broader collection. Charis’s collection, obviously, was narrower, but much deeper in feminist thought.
After leaving Macon, we spent 7 years in Nashville and a decade in Northern Virginia just outside DC. On Saturday, when I first started thinking about shopping for books in Nashville, I drew a blank. Surely I was buying books then! Then it hit me: the intervention of the Amazon behemoth. I actually learned about Amazon just before my last semester in Macon, when a colleague I was teaching with used the site to recommend a book we might use in our course. As I recall, I asked her what Amazon was, and she said she wasn’t sure. But I learned what it was, and it wasn’t long after we moved to Nashville that I was buying all of my books there. I continued to buy from Amazon while we lived near DC. I’m not proud of that now. I was naive; I remember thinking of it as in the same category as buying a computer by mail from Gateway Computer, or a similar machine a few years later from Michael Dell’s new startup. I thought of it as supporting the little guy. Of course, some of the little guys who survived grew pretty quickly into big guys, even bullies. Amazon is in that category. As I said, I’m not proud of my time with Amazon; it took me longer than it should have taken to move away from them, but I’m happy now to have left the whole family (Amazon, the WaPost, Whole Foods, and AbeBooks) behind.
From Virginia we moved to Boston, where we’ve lived for the last 11 years. My store of choice here is Harvard Bookstore. It’s across the street from its namesake university, but it’s a separate enterprise. It’s not a huge store, but they have a solid collection of philosophy, cultural studies, and literary non-fiction. Other collections seem strong as well, but I don’t spend much time (or money) in those sections. They also have a decent membership discount program and sell used books in their basement. Two other stores worthy of mention here in the Boston area are Brookline Booksmith and Porter Square Books, though I don’t frequent them. My wife likes the Porter Square store, not least because of their coffee shop. Booksmith, like many other indie stores, seems to have added a lot of non-book merchandise with better profit margins. Anything to survive, I suppose.
I frequent a couple of used bookstores here in Boston: Commonwealth Books and Brattle Books. I can get lost in these stores, browsing the collection for hours at a time. Each has a large selection of used books and each also carries some books worthy of the title antiquarian. Full disclosure: if you look hard and long enough at Commonwealth you just might find some books with my name on the inside cover. They’ve assisted a bit in my futile attempt to lessen the load of my personal library.
I’ve never lived in New York City, but we get there fairly often. One reason for that is we have family living in Brooklyn. Another reason is the large collection of wonderful bookstores. I suppose my favorite for new books in New York these days is Three Lives & Company. It’s small, but I think the collection of literary non-fiction is especially well curated. It also has the distinction of being featured in the opening pages of Evan Friss’s The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore. A tangent – I bought a copy of that book at Three Lives, and the clerk who sold it to me didn’t even mention the fact that the store was highlighted. The modesty seems consistent with the nature of the store. More bold than modest, though, are the staff recommendations – I try to check out that display every time I’m in NYC. Two other independent stores in NYC, each with multiple locations, are McNally Jackson and Book Culture. McNally Jackson has its own publisher, and has just announced their Marginalian Editions, a collaboration with Maria Popova, the creator and writer of the wonderful Marginalian newsletter. Both of these stores, I think, manage to hold on to the identity of the indie shop despite their multiple location – I think the Book Culture store in Long Island City does that best.
Other NYC bookstores slightly off my beaten path, but well worth a visit, are Greenlight Bookstore and Books are Magic (also with two locations).
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention NYC used bookstores. Of course there’s the monster Strand Books. Right around the corner from the Strand is the much smaller Alabaster Bookshop. Alabaster is the last remaining used bookstore in what was once a row of them on 4th Avenue near Union Square. They don’t have a website. It’s very small, but with a solidly curated collection of literary fiction and non-fiction. Many of the books are first edition classics, and a few of those are autographed copies. A bit more expensive than the Strand, but worth a visit. Much larger — even approaching the size of the Strand — is Argosy Books in midtown Manhattan. It’s family owned, now managed by two daughters and a son of the founder. I saw a documentary about how the used and antiquarian book market has been changed by the Internet that featured this family and their store. One of the daughters mentioned that they’ve been able to ride out the market so far in part because they own their building. The last time I was in the store, I visited a bit with one of the daughters and mentioned that as an advantage. She quickly pointed out that their taxes on that building were substantial — might she have said over a million dollars a year? It’s a hard world out there.
I’ll close by mentioning a few other stores around the United States that I’ve visited. The Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago was a highlight whenever I made it to that city. I’ve not visited their “new” store (scare quotes only because it’s not so new anymore); I loved walking through the crowded maze of bookshelves in their old basement location. Incidentally, Jeff Deutsch, the longtime manager of the Seminary Co-op bookstore, has his own book In Praise of Good Bookstores, which is a wonderful read for those who see browsing bookstore shelves to be prime entertainment. There’s Portland’s Powell’s Books, whose claim to be the world’s largest independent bookstore seems right to me. Another used bookstore in Portland is Daedalus Books (I don’t find a website for the store), where I was happy to discover a first edition of The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem. I enjoyed a few hours a couple of years ago in Denver’s Tattered Cover Book Store. And I was happy to discover Lost City Books, a seller of both used and new books, on a recent visit to DC. And thinking again of our time in Nashville, perhaps I would have seen the error of my Amazon ways sooner if Ann Patchett had opened Parnassus Books while I lived there. I really enjoyed my time there while visiting Nashville friends a couple of years ago.
Those are the stores that come to mind as I remember book store excursions. What stores come to your mind?