We come to something without knowing why

Early winter and the art of staying alive

As the bookshop heads into its fourth holiday season—and, more immediately, as numberless flakes of snow fall through the soft gray morning into the stoic golden grasses and dark green pines—I find myself in a state of contradiction: grateful for the severe tenderness of the cold season, in which energies ebb and introspection flourishes, and resentful of the many recurrent anxieties endemic to brick-and-mortar retail.

If winter is antagonistic to growth, I don’t see it. What I do see is a sharpening of forms—embodiment thrown into relief. I feel, in the fragile warmth of my body, a cold-begotten closeness, like huddling around a fire as the darkness grows. Winter is a drawing-near to something crystalline and perpetual. Winter says: “In spite of everything, you still exist— you get to live.” It is a stern grace. It is mysterious and exhilarating.

Embodiment, I think, is the principal virtue and value proposition of a 21st century bookstore. In an age when seeking out information is a digital exercise, bookstores make it physical. In an age when references are apparently endless, bookstores give them limits. Bookstores are like glaciers in our climate of artificial intelligence: exemplars of cultural balance, diminishing.

Stories of endless abundance saturate our economy and describe our engagement with media; during the holidays, these stories turn into a flood tide. But I am writing to say, with the preternaturally small voice of a community bookshop, that these stories are not true. And they don’t have to be in order for us to live, and live well. Cold is necessary. Slow is okay. The body warms up while gathering wood for the fire. — Joe

Rockwell Kent, The Trapper, oil on canvas, 1921 (source)

from The Lost Son, and Other Poems

It was beginning winter,
An in-between time,
The landscape still partly brown:
The bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind,
Above the blue snow.

It was beginning winter,
The light moved slowly over the frozen field,
Over the dry seed-crowns,
The beautiful surviving bones
Swinging in the wind.

Light traveled over the wide field;
Stayed.
The weeds stopped swinging.
The mind moved, not alone,
Through the clear air, in the silence.

  Was it light?
  Was it light within?
  Was it light within light?
  Stillness becoming alive,
  Yet still?

A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.

—Theodore Roethke