Parisian Metronome
There is a dark mahogany bookcase that has followed my family through different homes from the north to the south of the Mason-Dixon line. It has a rough striated burgundy finish, antique glass, and a worn brass latch. When you open up and peer inside it has a piercing triangular smell, and a Metronome my great-grandmother brought back from Paris. Everything has its own statement, its own sound, internal movement, and relation to the different stages of life it witnessed over time. Camus’ La Peste bound in dyed turquoise cloth, a jade horse, Jansen’s Art History books, a polished stone. An antique magazine with a story about a boy who jumped from higher and higher heights until he fell to his death at Niagara falls. A dark corner where I fancied that dreams slept in while I was awake.
I would take books out and look at them over and over, almost like a soldier going over a battle plan, or carressing a lover, flying over the hills and valleys that one can make out by the structure and composition of sentences and pictures. You start to get acquainted with the world behind the present world we walk through day in day out, year by year, century by century. A world outside of time that lives from one generation to the next in bookshelves and on walls and streets and sidewalks.
