I like books. That's a common enough sentiment, and it seems unnecessary to go into gushing detail about my passion for their tender spines, quiet reveries evoked by ink and paper smells, the jaunty way they lean to one side on a half-empty book shelf, the comfortable weight of them in my hands. Having only just finished an unsatisfying novel by a famous British author, I sit dejected and anxious in the leather of a bookstore armchair. I have passed the childhood capacity for total immersion that once brought with the end of any novel a bitter-sweet swoon, though it's unlikely that this most recently discarded specimen would have deserved such a response. Instead I set it carelessly on the arm of the chair and briefly entertain the idea of selling it back to the store. Then I remember it's on loan from the college library, and the prospect of withheld transcripts brings me to my senses.
On the self near my feet I read titles: "The Gay 100", "Lavender Culture", "Forbidden Friendships". Only the last title is even vaguely interesting, and in my post-literary haze I rest my head against the back of the arm chair and look up at a deep-set skylight. Clouds glide in and out of the frame, and though I try I cannot trick my mind into believing that the room is moving and not the sky. I remember doing this as a child: laying on my back under the ceiling windows, willing myself to feel the motion of the room around me like a moving ship until I grew dizzy and shut my eyes against the fantasy.
Irritated by the stillness, the sudden inactivity after hours of imagined movement through a fictitious life, I shove the disappointing book into my bag and stand. The shelves top out right at my eye level and I survey the total range of exploratory possibilities. Four long lines of shelves to my left are designated "FICTION", and I turn to them to assuage my lingering dissatisfaction. I stalk from one shelf to another, occasionally pausing to examine some classic I should probably read or some friend's sincere recommendation. The depth of my interest cannot sustain a serious inquiry, and all the books quickly return to their alphabetical positions. Each work promises intrigue, passions, painful insights, with such tedious back-jacket regularity that I seem to see the specter of disappointment lying, inevitable, between lines of critical acclaim.
Wandering toward the poetry section I feel exhausted by the walls of human drama that I pass. The burden of realistic fiction--compelling but never quite convincing characters, events at once mundane and impossibly synchronistic, endings either loose and dissipating or too perfectly complete--makes me long for the heroic metanarratives of my myth-saturated childhood: Odysseus lying face up on his shoddy raft, wanting to believe it's him floating toward Ithaca and not the clouds above him drifting.