My Spiritual Journey… Just Kidding, I lost my phone for a while.
I have come to understand lately that I have an obsession with old books. Not just any kind of old, the wrinkly vintage ones with battered, brown or yellow pages that can barely hold a flip, with covers that hang loosely, desperately onto its pages. They hold a particular smell incapable of inciting an emotion, yet somehow they carry memories. Stories of the lost. Stories about hope, stories that blur the barriers between love and war. These books don’t appear on the shelves of a corporate bookstore you spot inside a mall. You will have to search for them in places that don’t appear pretty or popular or obvious. If I can get a little cocky and assume I know something about it, I would suggest that you comb through the heaps of old book markets on the corner next to the supermarket chain. Or the library next to your school building, or that street vendor who keeps chanting invitations for you to come to check his store out. These books find their home in such places among the other desolate, beat down and smelly books, making themselves readily available for someone to find and value them again.
Now, why am I getting all mushy over old books now suddenly? If you have indeed bothered to ask that, allow me to tell you a short story.
A few days ago, I lost my phone, sober, in a cab.
*Insert wide gasps*
I had just returned home, saying goodbye to a friend who was moving to a different country, After long goodbyes and see-you-nevers, I returned home, expecting to take out my phone, and start mindlessly scrolling through every app I have on it. Only to my utmost, David Lynch-esq horror, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I turn my upside down to scour for the phone. I then had an inkling I had misplaced inside my ride home. The next 72 hours put me through the most boring yet inspiring journey. That all went back to its wild ways, (almost, I’ll tell you why) once I had Liam-Neeson-ed my phone.
I will not bore you with the humdrum of what I did dawn to dusk. But I will say this: I experienced life without digital voodoo after what seemed like decades since my face and my brain glued itself to it. It was confusing at the beginning. I felt lost without the internet, my playlist, and my social media. Lost without snooping in on the world that I knew existed without me. I felt scared that if people lose touch with my presence, they would forget my face and my voice and they would go on living a life, not knowing that I linger in their shadows. The paranoia and the irrational arguments I had with myself pushed me to get my act together.
Slowly, the five stages of grief reached their climax. I convinced myself that I may never recover my phone. So I picked up a book that had been sitting on the desk for a long while, untouched — Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. It was no coincidence that I started reading a book about a sad, lonely girl with a shit ton of baggage. I wanted company without the pressure of returning the same favour. Eleanor Oliphant gave me that, no, Gail Honeyman gave me that.
Fuck Carl Jung, there are only two archetypes that could exist. The first, being the ones content with their own company. They could be the hippest, life-of-the-party types or they could be one’s scratching the wall at a party, sipping non-alcoholic beer. These people can handle being alone even if they are Cast Away-ed. The second, obviously, are the ones who may experience an earthquake of the greatest magnitude if we left them alone with their own thought for over 24 hours. These people exist in all shapes and sizes, too. The only problem is that they don’t let themselves known for obvious reasons.
Loneliness has a bad reputation that’s worse than that of an STD. People would have to talk about chlamydia sooner than they would admit that they feel lonely. You would talk about global warming, the hunger crisis in Uganda or how much of a fuckface Tump is with the person sitting next to you. But would you open your mouth and say, “ I am lonely, are you?”
Whatever could the reason be for it, fear of inviting the wrong company or fear of becoming the wrong company? So, let’s put a pin on that conversation until you and I are ready.
Back to books, then. Before EOCF (Don’t bother, it’s the abbreviation for that book) I haven’t been able to sit my ass down and read 50 pages together. A textbook case of attention deficit. But devoid of distraction, and books being left as my only way out, I got my groove back. I started valuing the presence of books and reading.
Books have been my passion for a long time. But recently they have become more of a companion, confidant, a pocket-sized pastor ready to hear my confession whenever I needed it, since I moved to a country where I take comfort and offence at the same time on not belonging. I went from pretentious “bad c**t” who didn’t give a fuck to insecure little lamb in a few months.
That’s when I discovered the charm and comfort of old bookstores that sold old books that didn’t threaten to burn a hole in my pocket. These bookstores gave me a purpose for setting foot outside, an excuse to explore the city, and an absolute pleasure of being at peace with my own company. With a book in my hand and headphones over my hair, it’s easy for me to let people assume I’m a dope they’d want nothing to do with.
Sounds pathetic? Don’t feel sorry for me just yet. I am a person who, with great effort, learned to love solitude, it offered me so many things that people simply did not. Don’t get me wrong. I am not anti-social. Nor do I belong to that pitiful box that you call introversion. I don’t believe in that bullshit. I believe in good people and good company, it’s just that — Solitude, and silence gives space for my voice that a crowd simply doesn’t.
But, since my ‘big move’, I have lost that ability. It feels like I lost my superpowers. I could even cry like a little child to prove it.
Beauty is not lost when the ugly finds itself solace in the despicable.
Doesn’t it sound presumptuous? I know. But I am at the liberty to say it because I own a few and they are my most valued possessions. If my house is on fire, I know what I’ll grab on the way. If I am somehow on set on fire, I know what I’ll leave for my people. If you are someone in my life and you are extra nice to me, I’ll consider leaving one particular book that I hold dear to my life — my copy of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Do I need to sell you on it? Sure. Story time it is.
A fine Sunday evening. The sun refuses to fuck off, and I am left to deal with a beautiful weather, microwave pizza and a non-alcoholic cider. (turned out) I was reading a poem by Bukowski, ‘The Most Beautiful Woman In Town’. As the poem takes a bittersweet turn, I shift in my seat unhastily. I turned my attention to the stack of books on my table. My eyes land on my copy of Grapes of Wrath, one in a queue of books yet, and I started thinking about why I adore it, out of all the other non-living materials I own. I remember fishing this book out of a tiny pile of English books in a small Lithuanian Bookstore called Juodas šuo (Black Dog). It’s a “supposedly” secret bookstore, hidden inside an old building in the middle of the city (Plain sight, I know it is ingenious!).
The thing about old second-hand bookstores in a country where there is no immediate need for a global language is that you’d have to bend over backwards to find books in a language you speak and understand. So imagine my excitement when I found this hardbound copy of Grapes of Wrath for only 3.50 euros. Insanely cheap pricing for a hardcover is the last thing special about this book. This edition was published in the year 1978 in Moscow, Russia.
Simply put, the book has seen better days since it was published. This story, set in the era of the Great Depression, is all about hope and lack thereof. The prose has a sombre allure that drains and drags you into the story, making you a part of it. At the same time, it repels you. Perhaps that’s why the book was (Still is) a smash hit at the same time pissed so many Americans off. But the fact that this controversial book somehow found its way into a totalitarian country that was then (the 1970s) on the cusp of its darkest times, and rattled so many lives in the country, makes wonder the amount of dressing-down the book must have experienced. It survived harsh critics and book-burning ignorants. This book is beaten-down, tired of being more than what it is, a brilliant piece of literature. I could sympathize.
Politicians commodifying art, censoring irrelevant voices in the name of religion and patriotism, one would not live to see another daylight if one would attempt to write this book today. Believe me, you, where you see me use the word “commodifying” I do not disapprove of art being transactional. I am thrilled that I can make money with my art. But when the buyer assumes that by owning the art, he owns, the artist, the art, the past, present and the future of the genre, he steers us towards an Atwoodian dystopia. We don’t want that. Trust me and Margaret Atwood. Capitalism is a common man’s problem, don’t make it an elite’s concern.
So, as I lose myself to Arooj Aftab’s Saans Lo, I am leaving you all with this thought. It may come as a disruptive opinion, but is being materialistic wrong when the material you hold dear has a more humane story than I, as an actual human, ever could imagine experiencing? Why don’t you ponder over it while listening to Arooj? She is a gem, I tell you!
