Barnes & Noble

 I put my footsteps onto the threshold of Barns & Noble for the first time after over twelve years living in USA.  It is kind of weird, isn't it?  When it takes that long for a once-bookworm guy like me to do such a simple thing:  entering a best well-known bookstore to buy a novel.  Actually, on-line literature has pretty much invaded traditional one's territory these days to the extent that the latter seems to become extinct on some people's mind, myself included, which is obviously understandable when with just a few clicks away, we can almost find whatever we want online without the trouble of making a trip. 

It is so surprising for me to find that there are so many folks in there with their heads buried in books.   It turns out that some folks still act traditionally with traditional reading.  I feel like I just came back to the earth after such a long time living on Mars. I question myself if it is true that we can find everything online these days and the answer that comes across my mind is that : no, not absolutely.  We cannot find online an atmosphere in which all folks act the same way and focus on the same thing, the one in which the world outside seems to be forgotten giving way to concentration and enlightenment. Moreover, we can touch the source of enlightenment physically, caressing it, fondling it and it is always there in physical existence, not depending on any source of power.      

Putting my footsteps onto the threshold of Barns & Noble for the first time, I find back for myself  a whole precious, loving memorial sky of my childhood even though it was a memory kind of quiet and lonely. All I had was books, just books.  They came along my life as a loyal pal who confided to me his deepest secrets, told me a different story each day, showed me a different world in which things were more dramatic and people more human.  Even though I had a large bookcase with a few hundreds of books, it was not enough for me.  So I had to either rent the new ones or read them over and over.  And I had read them so many times that the day I went away from them, a part of my soul had been left behind. 

I find back in Barns and Noble some of my old books:  Gone With the Wind, the Thorn birds, Crime and Punishment, the Hunchback of Notre Dam... and with the next visits, I hope that I would find many more.  Each one I find back reminds me of a piece of the past which has been torn apart by the severity of time .  After such a long time, we meet each other again like two old pals having too much to say, to remind of, to go over and once more, I realize how loyal pals they are.   

 August 14, 2010

 Jefffrey Thai