Bibliophilia

The Sunday paper came just now. I dove right past the thick, black headlines in a frenzied quest for the Book Section, shrinking year by year and hidden so far inside the folded mass, it can take a couple passes to find it. I prefer to encounter my world as it appears when packaged between covers. Instead of bloody battlefields, maybe some anecdotal survey of the history of war, or armaments, or even fashions in uniforms — or something tracing the rise and fall of empires, bestowing a sense of pattern, of the broad sweep of time without the threat that time itself will be swept out from under all our feet. Instead of tracts describing the ongoing clashes between nations, the scandals within institutions, I like to read of short stories about the everyday people who make up those nations and institutions. Somehow, the discomfiting disasters of the thick, black headlines, trailing their dark clouds of smoke, have been refined away, siphoned off —civilized, when seen through this lens. In my leisure, I survey the hidden life behind 'events', and find it goes quite well with a good cup of coffee. (.....july23)