The Greatest Invention
I remember reading Jason Guriel’s essay about browsing in The Walrus when it came out in 2021. I actually picked up a copy of his book (which contains the essay) on Indie Bookstore Day — I was the official photographer for the occasion in Edmonton.
I suppose I had been despairing about the ways in which the world is changing — first we had the pandemic, disinformation, shootings, then genocides, dictatorships, wars, climate change, forest fires, gen AI theft of our work, a general lack of ethics, and then amid all that we had our own personal traumas, tragedies, losses. I could go on. If I had a therapist perhaps they’d talk about the general ptsd we’re all suffering from inhabiting the traumosphere for as long as we have.
So yes, all that. ALL. THAT. But one day I found myself taking photographs in 12 different Indie bookstores. (Well, it was two days, but you get it). And it felt amazing. Browsing the shelf, seeing others browse, picking up and hefting books, reading passages, talking about books. In Guriel’s book, he says “I can certainly remember where I was when I first encountered a great many of my favourite books.” I remember all the books I bought in Italy and I remember working at the Book Company in Southgate Mall and all the books I bought there with my discount. I remember buying a copy of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller there after hearing about it in a comparative lit class. That copy somehow ended up in Rob’s basement library and for years I thought I’d mistakenly culled it in one of my weedings. On our last trip to Rome, I realized I wanted to read it again there, and bought my third copy of it. Last week Rob found my original copy on his studio shelves when he was looking for something else and the emotions I felt!
As Guriel says, “For my part, I’ve always needed the works of art that matter to me to be near me.” He says, “What we choose to surround ourselves with helps define those selves. We are what we love.”
He quotes Christian Wiman on Seamus Heaney who says that “if a person has a single poem in his head, one that he returns to and through which, even in small ways, he understands his life better, this constitutes a devotion to the art.” Guriel says that this kind of devotion to a poem, steeping yourself in it, is “to approach the state of prayer.” This is how we may be transformed.
I hope you have a favourite poet? A favourite poem?
Now is the time to ask ourselves what we love. I love books. I always have. I love reading them, and holding them, and I love the hope and the dreams and the stories they contain. The facts! The worlds. The perspectives from people that I wouldn’t otherwise meet or places I will never go. Thoughts, philosophies. Lives lived. Lives! Life!
I love holding books. I love re-reading the books I love. I love taking photographs of books! Books, I love you. I love watching a movie based on a book I love and then going back to the book and loving it all over again in new ways. I love talking about a book with someone and they saw something I didn’t. I love taking a single sentence from a book and typing it out and saying it and sharing it. I love being regularly astonished by how words spark one against the other and how sentences somehow contain a style that you have never until then come across. I love how a sentence by one author will resound and then take you to another author and you will learn to hear echoes and rhythms.
I love words. I love sentences.
In an epigraph to a chapter titled “What is a Sentence” in Jan Mieszkowski’s book Crises of the Sentence, John Banville says, “The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization.”
The greatest invention is still the sentence. The book, another great invention. Best technology. Poems, another great invention.
Fernando Pessoa:
“I broke with the sun and stars. I let the world go.
I went far and deep with the knapsack of things I know.”
Pessoa, my soul to your soul.
My only advice right now is to go deep with those things you love. Get vertical. Be like the painters. I think of the flowers my husband paints.
I think about what John Berger says about getting close enough for true collaboration:
“When a painting is lifeless it is the result of the painter not having the nerve to get close enough for a collaboration to start. He stays at a copying distance. Or, as in mannerist periods like today, he stays at an art-historical distance, playing stylistic tricks…” “To go in close means forgetting convention, reputation, incoherence, even madness.”
Let’s also remember what our raison d’être is and as John Berger also reminds us, “Wild flowers...are the colours they are in order to be seen.” How do you want to show up and be seen? Cultivate that.
Let’s keep our nerve, shall we? Let’s love, let’s praise the mutilated world, as Adam Zagajewski says.
May 31, 2025
Note on the photos: Florence, Italy, November of 2024 taken, as always, by yours truly.
Ps. To those of you reading in the newsletter: Mailchimp is ending their free basic plan and frankly, I can’t pay more than I already do for this labour of love. I’ll be working on setting up an RSS feed or some other way to get this to you in newsletter form but life has been a bit life-y of late and I’m not there yet. A great opportunity to learn something new though, lol. So if you don’t see this in your newsletter after this post, please look me up online? THAAAANKKKSSSS xo Shawna
