It's a place I've always really loved, although I regret the demise of the antique mall and the world's coolest used bookstore (now occupied by standard retail boutiques). I loved it last night, too. The winter light was spilling in purple over the hills, Christmas lights were still twinkling from all the houses, streetlights and trees, and it was chilly and crisp, but in a nice way. I was sort of looking for half-price Christian Christmas cards and nice wrapping paper, but really I just wanted to go there and that was my excuse.
I didn't find any nice Christian cards. That was no surprise. For at least three years, I've been recycling the cards I bought when I lived in SC. It was sad though. Most of the magic has been stripped from Christmas. Most people don't give gifts any more - witness the stunning decline in Christmas retail numbers over the last five years - and hardly anyone even talks about Christmas, except to mock the religious meaning or to demand that it be grouped with all other "winter festivals".
There used to be, for me at least, a genuine blessing that could be sensed in the air. Even if people didn't have religious beliefs, they were moved by the inclination to think about Peace on Earth and Goodwill Towards Men. The Charles Dickens story "A Christmas Carol", which helped define the snow-covered London appearance of Christmas in the American imagination, really illustrates the once-treasured capacity of the season's blessing, and the expectation that even hard hearts could open up to generosity and love for one's fellow beings.
Today it's gone. At the barn on December 29, while I was cleaning up my horse, I heard an elderly French man wish a woman with two small children, "Merry Christmas!"
Her response? "Oh, we don't celebrate Christmas."
So WHAT? That's a justification for throwing the kind words of a friendly old man in his face? That woman would never have dreamed of responding so rudely and condescendingly to the greeting, "Happy Diwali!" For all her self-enlightened confidence, she had no kindness.
That's just one incident, but there are so many. I could wear out my keyboard.
Anyway, in my quest for wrapping paper and Christmas cards, I found myself at last in Border's Bookstore.
I usually avoid bookstores, unless they're used, because they've become for me a depressing experience. The things on the bestseller lists provide a seriously horrible statement about the weak condition of our social and cultural pulse. No one is alarmed any more by profanity, although for me, curse words always have the same effect as if someone just threw a piece of trash right at my head. Also, no one analyzes anymore. It's not required for what we now call "thought". What we now call "thought" is, listening to and adopting the thoughts of others with which we happen to agree, uncritically. I will write more on this some other time, but here is what I saw in the bookstore:
"Skinny Bitches" - isn't anyone but me sick of seeing women who refer to themselves as bitches as though it were something to congratulate themselves for? Like it makes them interesting or something? The word has been in the title of a prominently featured book every time I've walked into a bookstore in the last five years.
"The Bible of Good Sex" - Wow. What does this have to do with God? This thing was as thick as a ream of paper, or an encyclopedia, which would have been far more appropriate to use as a title. I shudder to think about how thousands of pages were devoted to making your partner into a better sex toy for you, at the expense of intimacy and love.
"The Truth About... "/ "The True History of... " Everything you ever learned in school, Queen Elizabeth, Anne Boleyn, Shakespeare, Jesus, Christianity, Christmas, Chistopher Columbus, you name it. Take any original source, suppress the parts you don't like and exaggerate the parts you do, and you too can write a book like these. Better yet, take a source that you can't prove even exists (like the "Q" text, or the so-called secret society crypto-documents) and write a large book claiming that everything you think it would say if it did really exist is true. It's an automatic recipe for a best-seller, and no one will challenge you because no one cares any longer to find, compare or evaluate historical sources to see if you are producing garbage. This completes a trend started over 20 years ago, when it suddenly became professionally risky for historians to challenge books that claimed that popular historical figures (Socrates, Jesus, Shakespeare, Columbus... ) were black, or (ten years later) gay, or (recently) never real people at all. Now you can claim anything. The probability that you will be challenged is zero, and you can make a lot of money.
"I Am America and So Can You" by Stephen Colbert - I like Stephen Colbert a lot because he's really funny, but the rigid one-sidedness of his incisive wit is what depresses me. An example is the phrase, "Remember, Reality is colored with a Liberal tinge!" This mocking statement is meant to silence critics of the media who claim that it presents issues with a seriously liberal slant. It illustrates that to most liberals, the slant is not a slant, but "reality", one that conservatives must be too stupid to observe. The problem is that both sides view their beliefs as "reality", and the paradigms don't coincide. The liberal paradigm is that this world is all there is - therefore, morality is relative and should be determined by the outcome that makes everybody feel best. The conservative paradigm is that morality is not relative, and that everyone being made to feel good is an invalid outcome unless it was arrived at in cooperation with a higher morality that is determined from a source outside of ourselves and our current social agendas. That Mr. Colbert conveniently ignores the difference in paradigms and insists, however humorously, that his is "reality", is an example of shallow thinking. It's very unfortunate that he has so much material at hand that well deserves criticism and mockery, but it doesn't excuse the lack of thought that he puts into the premises behind his skits.
"Eat, Pray, Love" - iiiiiiicccckkkkk. A better title would be, Consume, Thank God I'm a Consumer, Gratify Myself. But it's number one on the best seller lists right now, with a message everyone wants to hear. The message is false from the start, when the author got an advance from the publisher before even starting her self-centered journey. But false messages being what an astonishing number of people want to hear, it's a winner.
I'll fill out this list some more next time I find myself in a bookstore, which I hope will not be any time soon. I didn't intend to write a post or take notes on obnoxious titles when I went to Los Gatos last night, or I'm sure this post would be about twenty times longer. I've only put in what stuck in my head as being particularly awful.
Fortunately I did find some beautiful wrapping paper at Domus, and was able to scoot on home in triumph. Los Gatos is so lovely that even the trip home is beautiful with the lights of the valley glowing gold against a purple sky as one comes up over Winchester. I hope to go back soon, but next time I'll avoid Border's!
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