On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores

The Commerce of Thinking

43 The Commerce of Thinking But the book that is thrown into the depths of such a bookstore, magazine of traces, imprints and reminiscences—the bookstore whose other, the shop on the street, is in sum nothing but an inverted reflection, such as appears where a palace is surrounded by large pools of water—the book so expedited into memory and hackneyed repetition , into whispered recitation, also finds in that subterranean recollection the expansiveness and lightness of a flight into free air. For the book always and only goes from Idea to Idea, and its opening, its enlivened and loosened pages, followed from right to left and from top to bottom, or in the opposite directions and following every possible combination, its patient and meticulous readings as well as its greedy and hurried ones, its studies, commentaries, glosses, analyses, plagiarisms and parodies, only spread ever more widely, ever more impalpably, the substance of its Idea, which ends up losing itself by finding itself metamorphosed, metempsychosed, or metaphorized into other books, into innumerable 44 volumes, booklets, lampoons, essays, pamphlets, opuscules become volumes themselves once more, folios, quartos, octavos, into indefinitely multiplied issues that disperse into the air the dust of sense and ashes of the Idea, an Idea in ashes not for having been put on the pyre (the smoke of auto-daf és, whose name is so repugnant, represents the exact opposite of the book, and piling up a bonfire is an exact figure of the demolition of the bookstore and its shelves), but for having been liberally scattered into the vast cosmos through which shines the star shower of the Idea. A book is a meteor that breaks up into thousands of meteorites whose random courses provoke collisions, strokes of genius, sudden crystallizations of new books, unpublished tracings of characters, enlarged, revised, and corrected editions, an immense interstellar circulation . A book always dreams of becoming an aerolith in flames, a comet whose flaming mane consumes the Idea into the dust of glory and the experience of the infinite. The bookstore opens this free air of experience, of the risk and chance of a glimpse at what cannot be seen, what in the Idea exceeds 4 every form and every character. The bookstore always keeps deep within itself something of the hawker of books, that strapping fellow loaded down with little duodecimos and sextodecimos, booklets falling out of his sack and slipped into his coattails or hat, adept not only at selling them but at advertising them too, and, if necessary, reciting them by heart from beginning to end—Manon Lescaut, Young Werther, or Sheherazade—a nomad shopkeeper and storyteller, walking bard, strolling door-to-door merchant [marchand marcheur et démarcheur ] of cheap editions, bookstore in sunshine and rain of the fields and strand and open road. A bookstore is always found on the edge of a grand avenue that leads nowhere but from book to book, delivered over to itself and following the tracks of its idea, word for word indefinitely reprinted, a grand avenue along which this emotional and subtle commerce of thinking never ceases, for in it is resumed and consumed the pure and always novel form of what we call the book. ...