The
paragraph that I leave you here brought to my mind a very vivid
memory from my childhood, although a bit different from the text
above. When I was little, every time my family visited my father's
home town – Stara Zagora, the two of us with my brother had a very
important ritual. We just had to visit one of the big book-stores in
the city called Pingvinite (The Penguins). I
was so indescribably happy to smell the aroma of new books, to choose
The One that I would bring home with me... I believe I still have
this obsession with book-stores.
©
2015, Cristiana Bobeva
*
* *
Every
two weeks or so, my mother takes me to the library to provide for my
next fortnight's reading. Every time, I anticipate the event as if it
were a trip into Sesame itself. The library is located in a narrow,
old street, in an ancient building, which one enters through a heavy
wooden door. The interior is Plato's cave, Egyptian temple, the space
of mystery
and magic, on whose threshold I stand a humble acolyte.
It is yellowly lit, smoky with dust and respectful whispers, and
behind the counters, which stop the customers from entering farther,
it reveals deep, ceiling-tall rows if shelves. When your turn comes,
one of the guardians of the mysteries – most of them bespectacled
women in black, satiny versions of a nurse's uniform – approaches
for a consultation. My mother mentions some author or title she's
interested in. And as for me – what might I want to read next? And
adventure story? A boarding school novel? Something historical? The
very thought of these possibilities makes the next two weeks a
terrain of potential pleasure. The guardian then quietly vanishes
into the cavernous interior, to emerge with a sack of musty,
yellow-paged volumes. I open them; I sniff their aged smell; I read a
few words; some of them have illustrations at which I look greedily;
then I have to choose from the riches of Araby.
Eva
Hoffman, Lost
in Translation
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