The Bookseller stays home

I’ve not been to work for three days. I’ve not stepped on public transport for that long, either, although I did buy my March bus pass, but that’s not even close to being the same thing. My laundry is done, my fridge is cleaned out, although it is not clean and there’s been some sweeping around the place that pleases me.

It occurred to me, when this vast open space of workless days all in a row presented themselves, that I would have no idea what to do with the time. Ha. Ha!

I read a lot. So much that I am not in a place where I can read anymore right now, or listen to music or lectures or even feed myself, because I’m Just That Full.

Homer has been with me this entire time.

The entire first chapter of ExtraVirginity features Odysseus and olive oil and the questions surrounding what that means to people in our version of the here and now. At the end of the chapter, someone made scented oil with roses: it smells of the Mediterranean.

Jerusalem was bound to bring the bard to mind with its layers of tragedies and homecomings. Leaders deposed, peoples massacred, livelihoods destroyed under the orders of army leaders not even attached to the city’s people or land; these echo.

I’d sort of hoped that Blood, Bones & Butter would lead me away from the violence and harshness of olive oil and sea travel and a world filled with instability and fragility and I was wrong. It left me full and vulnerable and the mere mention of oil from Puglia cast a net over this incongruous reading list and day-to-day living that I can barely begin to imagine.

Even the mystery that I read did not let me be in peace; ideas of responsibility for actions over time and human behavior and the traps of class and how education does not always allow people to get out of them finding their way through the muck of London sewers and into my nice little world view.

What is here is not what I wanted to say, and that’s alright. My feelings are definable, what they relate to is not yet real in words. I remember The Loss Library and its central story and the shelves of books that would have been written but for confidence or silence or carefulness and I must re-think my audience and consider the shape of my walls and perhaps the words that overflow will land on them.