In the presence of possibility
I love the smell of a new book and the luxury of wandering through a bookshop and being in the presence of possibility. Its exhilarating to take a book of the shelf and read the forward because the name looks interesting and it does something that the internet and AI can never replace. It connects us through shared experience writer to reader, reader to fellow reader and I fear we are losing the joy of it in a world where we can purchase experience without experiencing it.
My favourite bookshop is McNaughtan’s [https://www.mcnaughtans.co.uk/n’s], when you walk down the steps time slows and then ceases as you open the door. There is a bell that I am sure the underworld is missing, it signals your arrival and the journey dissipates into the smell of history and the creak of a floor that feels like the deck of a ship. In my heart I am on the Dawn Treader looking for Aslan and watching the Mer people escort me to the edge of the world. There is a bit of Lucy in all of us, the wonder, belief and insecurity in the face of others. She sought Aslan to find herself; and its at the edge of human experience that C S Lewis experience captured so beautifully, that she did.
I am not sure if it matters if the book is new or a discovery. It mattered to Lucy that she was believed by the people she loved, and she trusted the wonder of new friendship beside a fire and to the lure of hot food on a winters day. She knew that Edmund knew, and his experience was tied into his ego and the ease with which she was dismissed broke her heart. I wonder who C.S.lewis had in mind when her wrote her character or if he was a keen observer on the frames that hold people in place.
If I am honest for me, it is Lucy who is the hero, not Peter, Edmund or Susan. Susan and Lucy followed Aslan to the stone table, and they accompanied him after his resurrection to breathe life into the petrified characters, and it is Lucy’s gentleness gave grace the sacrifice.
Books give us the opportunity to follow Aslan through the woods and lead others when they cannot see the path. Its is the cumulative experience from handprints on caves, to oral history, to textile stories, to cartography, to written language, to code and now to AI that brings me here.
The maps are a story and I have the privilege of telling it and hopefully finding your story in the footprints of the past.
