Dialogue: How to bring the busy life to book

By JOE BENNETT

"I told him he was a fool," said the journalist.

I asked why.

"Because," said the journalist, "he threw in a perfectly good job - pension, promotion, security, the lot - threw it in and cashed up and ... "

He paused while the waiter arrived with our lunch.

"And what?" I asked.

"And bought a second-hand bookshop. And not even a decent one. It's tucked up some side street visited only by dogs and old women."

"Not much point in asking how he's doing then?"

"No," said the journalist, "there isn't," and he snorted, and we looked down at our plates. Mine held fish, his a steak in a blood puddle. He pinioned the steak with a fork and sawed at the corner. I watched the fibres tear and ooze.

It's not a rare dream, I think, to run a second-hand bookshop, to spend your more boisterous years wringing money from the world and then to shrink into a quiet street and spend the balance of days among tall walls of books. The world is too much with us. Walls of books keep it off. Books are the world at one remove. They are permanent, fixed and safe.

They can be beautiful but they can't hurt, not really hurt. The wounds inflicted by reading, the griefs and fears, are theatrical wounds, are pleasant pain.

To sit all day amid old books, while outside the traffic hisses through the wet winter, going somewhere, urgent and frantic. To see the occasional customer, a quiet soul in a drab raincoat who wanders along the spines of knowledge, cocking his head to catch the titles, his nature illustrated by the shelves he heads for.

It is not business, or rather it is as close to not being business as business can be.

Most of the authors are dead and so are most of the books. The authors who are judged to be live currency will be taken from the shelves within days of coming in but most will prove to be groats or guineas, no longer current in the busy spending minds that throng the city.

A second-hand bookshop is a graveyard of spent passions, and the proprietor is the sexton. I often visit such shops and I do so in just the same way as I duck into a church. It is a quiet place, a sanctuary. I like the smell and the peace and I like the books.

Today I bought for $5 the Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy. Hardy made plenty of money from his novels but after Jude the Obscure he gave up on prose and for the last 15 years of his life he wrote only poetry. It was his way of retiring from the busy streets.

He left the new bookshop in the high street with its bright pile of bestsellers and moved, as it were, to the back street and the second-hand shop that just gets by.

On the flyleaf of the book I bought, written in cheap blue ballpoint:

Danny

Merry Christmas

Good luck up the Whataroa

Happy Reading

Lots of love

Jackie

If that doesn't make your spine tingle we have different vertebrae. I would like to know if Danny read Hardy up the Whataroa. For some reason I doubt that he did. I doubt even that he took the book with him.

But if he did and if he sat with it in the evening alone looking out over the deserted valley, he might have found these lines:

William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, hp+2Father Ledlow late at plough,

Robert's kin, and John's, and Ned's,

And the Squire, and Lady Susan, lie hp+2in Mellstock churchyard now.

And in the churchyard of the poem hp+2the voices of the dead speak:

We've no wish to hear the tidings, hp+2how the people's fortunes shift;

What your daily doings are;

Who are wedded, born, divided; if hp+2your lives beat slow or swift.

Was there, perhaps, some similar sense of withdrawal from the world that drove Danny up the Whataroa, without his Jackie? And is it perhaps the same urge that drives hermits into caves, monks into monasteries and busy businessmen into the isolation of a shop selling second-hand books?

The journalist laid down his knife and fork.

"I went to see the bloke the other day," he said. "In his shop."

"How was he?" I asked.

The journalist mopped the blood from his plate with a piece of bread and popped it in his mouth.

"Happy," he said.