The Recurring, Ineluctable Summer...

Memorial Day Weekend is here (horray!?) signaling an unofficial beginning of summer. The imminence of summer is turning me quite grumpy. I don't like the summer; it's my least favorite season. I hate the heat, the living things, the mocking sun:

Not that I'm losing my grip: I am just tired of summer.
You reach for a shirt in a drawer and the day is wasted.
If only winter were here for snow to smother
all these streets, these humans; but first, the blasted
green. I would sleep in my clothes or just pluck a borrowed
book, while what's left of the year's slack rhythm,
like a dog abandoning its blind owner,
crosses the road at the usual zebra.

From "A Part of Speech"
Joseph Brodsky

At least the Strand is air-conditioned,' I momentarily thought on Saturday. The bookstore provided a much needed shelter from the sweltering metropolitan heat. But wait a minute--I am so sure the Strand was NOT air conditioned a few years back... I can even hear the inefficient fan in my mind. Yet shee doesn't remember the Strand not being air-conditioned. So can someone tell me if my memory is real or imagined?

In any case, I am not sure if I like air-conditioned Strand. That means I will have to contend with other people when I shop for books this summer. Granted, people buying books preserve the place (already the annex near the sea port closed down...), but I'd rather deal with the heat and the stuffiness (of the air) than (stuffy) people. You have to be oddly assertive at the Strand, especially near the popular fiction stands. Are you going to progress around the corner and check out all the books that are displayed so that you can give yourself a chance to pick up that book you always wanted to read for five dollars, or are you gonna back off because there's three other people in front of you? I never had a problem though--I can usually squeeze by. Besides, you can always escape temporarily down to the psychology section that lines a wall in the basement. The shelves tremble every few minutes as a train pulls out of the Union Square Station and you feel so safe from the crowd in the underbelly of the city sustained by dusty psychoanalytic writings.

So okay, I will probably cope with the air-conditioning, but I don't know if I can if they add a cafe and comfy chairs.

The summer isn't quite here yet. I still have maybe a month of reprieve form the heat, the people and the mosquitoes. I will miss the days when it's still a bit chilly in the morning. I will miss reading under a comforter and wearing knitted things. But maybe reading at the beach a few times will make me forget and abide by the summer rules.

signs of aging...

You have to please excuse me and perhaps indulge me in some spring whining. The gist of it every year is that I feel old. Oh the many signs are there. And indeed it's a spring time ritual of mine to list them. This year is especially hard though: alas the effects of the accumulating years has finally seeped into my reading life where I thought I could forever be young.

Big shock I was not ready for: I have read a memoir, a MEMOIR!, written by someone approximately my age. Here I am thinking my life hasn't really begun, and someone has written a memoir about our generation. The someone happens to be Sloane Crosley. The book is called: I was told there'd be cake. And okay, she's actually a bit older than me and the book is excellent... but still. Perhaps growing old means finding an increasing number of new novels that allude to times and events that one has lived through. One day, the Philip Roths of our generation will pop out, every few years, books about coming of age with too many possibilities, no marketable skills, and the facebook.

And no longer deniable: I accept that there are a finite number of books I can read in my lifetime. Seems so obvious to me now, but even five years ago, I didn't really believe I won't get to read everything. Before you consider me totally silly, ask yourself this: when you were in fifth grade, did you think you can be done with reading? Did you even think you will make it to the 30 minute mark assigned to you to read? I know the logic is pretty clear. Human beings are mortals; mortals can only read a finite number of books; I am a human being; ergo, I can only read a finite number of books. A young heart, however, is not ready to accept certain logical conclusion. So it makes me feel really sad (and old) that I accept I will one day read my last page.

And there you have it. Maybe a life is a sum of pages read: You accumulate the pages and then you die. I better choose wisely.