Destination of the Month: Greece

Like lots of precocious teenagers, I too had a Nietzsche phase. I even obsessively read The Birth of Tragedy, his first one, much milder than his later tracts and ostensibly his jumping off point from philology to his own brand of philosophy. The book likes to hammer home the dichotomy between the Apollonian and the Dionysian arts - that is the "plastic" arts like sculpture and its opposite arts like music and poetry that came afterward and celebrate the more unconscious frenzied and liberated side of things. It is the opinion of your humble narrator that this dichotomy exists in all the best stories. "Beauty and the Beast." Jane Eyre. Narcissus and Goldmund. Lady Chatterley's Lover. Brothers Karamazov. And Zorba the Greek, one of my favorites of all time is no exception. (Though Zorba is from Crete and not exactly Greek I have to mention. But Aristotle is Macedonian, so I say Greek is a state of mind, man, live and let live). Zorba is a refreshing, effervescent novel, a shot of ouzo with a hint of lemon on a beautiful beach. It's a love letter to life, and to enjoying one's work and seizing the moment, and if there's anything that this long winter, now finally fading has taught us hardy New Englanders is to be like Zorba's foil Basil and run for the sun! Enjoy it while it lasts! So stop by and get inspired to see the ruins of the Delphic oracle, find true happiness in Aristotle, learn to ask for saganaki in Greek or meander your own maze sans minotaur, and let Kazantzakis be your oracle for a fantastic new adventure:

“This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realize of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale.” -Zorba the Greek

The Proust is in the Pudding

So a bunch of the nerdiest staff members are gathering together and tackling Proust's epic, 6-volume novel In Search of Lost Time. Some of us have read it before, some of us are in book 5, some are fresh and new to the longest novel in the universe, but we're all having fun eating madeleines and talking about the book, and there is QUITE A LOT to talk about when each page has a whole novel's worth of unpacking to be done about it.

I have had as much fun finding and reading secondary material on Proust while I make my way through the series. My background in philosophy in particular is sending me on all kinds of romps through Husserl, Bergson and Merleau-Ponty to not only refresh my memory on phenomenology but to see also how the moment-to-moment perceptions and almost stream of consciousness style move along the observations and action in the novel.

If you're interested in a similar pursuit, there have been some serendipitous coincidences of arrivals in the UBC on the front of Proust-related books.

David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous
Abram's book is an investigation of language and perception and how through history our language and means of storytelling have influenced our conception of space and time; a subject of primary importance to Proust.

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Bergson was a contemporary of Proust's, and in fact he even married Proust's cousin. Proust read Bergson and was highly influenced by him. Creative Evolution is a work written on the heels of Darwin drawing on immediate, moment-to-moment sense experience to explain reality, rather than pure reason alone. We got this beautiful Modern Library edition WITH a rad dust jacket that I lovingly mylared for you.

Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life
de Botton turns to Proust's modern epic to learn important life lessons. Important chapters include: "How to take your time," "How to read for yourself," and perhaps most importantly, "How to be happy in love."

and of course, there's Proust himself. We have several volumes and versions of the epic novel.

Curl up with some madeleines, tea, and the perfect autumn to winter novel (and any and all supplementary materials), and read along with the staff!

Why We Read

Brookline customers are a pretty smart bunch. Here are some figures:

This is pulled from Sperling's Best Places. We spend a lot on students. We have a lot of degrees; not just high school, but undergrad AND graduate degrees. With the proximity of BC and BU we have a lot of current students and professors in our midst. So as a result, there are a couple of sections in our store that get hit pretty frequently. Philosophy, for example. We don't get too many books in, but when we do they SELL. And how. So after the holiday rush, our philosophy shelves were looking pretty lean. It happens. Our stock is reliant on what people bring to us, and stuff moves and changes fast. So sometimes, our shelves get thin until magic book fairies (i.e., you) bring us more. But we make sure to only get the good stuff in, so what we do have is CHOICE.

But what to do when the books get all floppy and the shelves get empty? I dunno about those Amazon guys, but I get creative. And I put to use my undergraduate philosophy degree. I cleared off a shelf for a display and thought: what are important books in this section? Who doesn't own a copy of Kant's Groundwork that needs one? The best part of actually reading a book (for me, anyway) are those lines that stick with you forever, or finally make sense of the 120 preceding pages. The quotes we put on our Facebook profiles, in our friend's yearbooks, e-mail signatures, tattooed on arms, the lines that are mini-epiphanies that rock our worlds. In short, it's the words inside books that make us read. Sometimes there are books on a shelf that you haven't read, maybe because you're pressed for time, or you're reading Room With a View for the eightieth time, or maybe it's because book designers don't know what to do with philosophy books and the philosophers sure as heck don't know how to title their books, so they look boring but really they are GENIUS and they will change your life forever if only you knew that those brilliant quotes lived inside their pages.

So in order to jazz up a decent looking philosophy display, I wrote down some salient quotes from the books. Quotes that embody the meaning and importance of the book, or in some cases just haunted me forever. So now, hopefully, casual browsers will know why to pick up a 200 page non-fiction book on how we fall in love written in the 17th centry. Or maybe they'll just struggle at reading my awful handwritten scrawl. Either way!

Aristotle's Poetics

Kant's Groundwork

Sartre's Essays in Existentialism

Stendhal, On Love

Anyway, like I said, we're thin on philosophy. And poetry. And local stuff. Do you have some such books that are rad, have no underlining or highlighting and are just collecting dust on your ever-so-smart shelves? Let me give you money for them! Wednesdays through Saturdays, 10 AM to 4 PM. Thanks for reading!