going to pamplona made me remember this unfinished entry from earlier in the semester.

november 2004.

and yet it has come to pass that an independent bookstore can, after twenty-eight years, go out of business in harvard square. i went in on thursday to the wordsworth liquidation sale and felt immensely guilty. only two days ago rikita had delivered a diatribe against bookbuyers coming down on wordsworth as vultures amongst the carcasses, so that my visit was tinged with embarrassment and even some furtiveness. the bookcases were quite bare by that time; what books there were left were placed face up, and then even the cases were for sale - "no reasonable offer refused." there was a woman on her cellphone and i caught the words "yes they've gone bankrupt" before i turned into the next aisle and had to scrunch my nose up to stop from tearing. when i came on the map lying on its side in an aisle i stared at it for a long time and then took it up to the counter. i wasn't even sure it was for sale, but the lady said i could have it for $60 - well $40, she relented. i couldn't really spare that, but i did. it is a large blue and brown ink-drawn map of harvard square. it isn't just that i've been wanting a map like this for a long time, but i wanted badly to have something from the bookstore that was artefact rather than stock. and the map, frame and all, with its scruffings and small tears and nicks, was worth more to me as a piece of history.

the fact that i felt immense sadness for a bookstore which i've only for the second time in my life stepped into has very little to do with memory and even less to do with the common heart-tug at unhappy endings which for the bookish is most strongly felt about the closure of bookstores. what it is is a specific grief at exclusion, and what it has to do with is the sense of inherited history which i feel all the time now in this city. i have never watched a baseball game in my life, and have not lived here for even two months, but i am thrilled and proud about the red sox winning the world series. john kerry lost the elections, and suddenly i'm part of the "we" of disappointed blue massachusetts. a month ago i had never stepped into wordsworth bookstore - now i care about the twenty-eight years of its existence that i had not and could not participate in and no longer can.

this is not the way i've felt in charlottesville, in which history meant little except for what i made for myself and what i chose to see: charlottesville was home to me because i had lived there and made it mine. my love and my special places were acquired through doing and living, but never merely in accordance to my bond or because it was an institution. i have never gone to the foxfield races. i never go to football games even though i lived two hundred metres from the stadium. i didn't walk the lawn at graduation - they mailed me my diploma. but the farmers' market or spudnuts or the nook, the magnolia tree behind the rotunda and the white columns on the lawn, those were selective and private acts even as they were also known to all and loved by many. and it was possible to ignore what one wished to - you could build filters around you by refusing knowledge, refusing participation, and you could enjoy it. here inheritance is unavoidable - i imagine that the person who moves to new york feels this way too - e.b. white's 18 inches. it is as if moving into a space where history is so ingrained in the common imagination that the corresponding sense of inherited - i won't use the word obligations - because it is not a burden or a duty - place, or of belonging. the sense that the city is laden with the past and the destiny - that entering it at any point or any point in time you found yourself existing there as if you have always been there - have always done the same thing - remember the merlin conspiracy? where a lifetime of knowledge was downloaded in a single moment. that is how i feel.