Space invaders

There are lines.

We don’t always know where they are. We usually don’t even realize they are there. But every once in a while they get damaged, and then we realize that they are the very lines that we use to trace the boundaries of ourselves, and the contours of each other. We often don’t notice when these lines begin to bend. But the moment they are broken, we suddenly see them with stark clarity.

Some years ago a good friend of mine, a very kind and gracious woman, suggested that we have a book club. I thought it was a splendid idea. She suggested we hold it in my apartment. Since my apartment is much bigger than hers, the suggestion made a lot of sense to me. I was looking forward to an opportunity to invite some interesting people over, and to having conversations about some of the great literary works. Or even, occasionally, not so great literary works, just to mix things up a little.

I’m pretty easy going with the whole visitor thing. I have only one rule in my apartment: People need to take off their shoes. I’m pretty sure it’s a legacy from the time when I’d had a girlfriend with a Japanese background. We started the tradition when she moved in, and I continued it after she moved out. I like the idea of the formal separation of inside and outside space.

The first meetings of the book club were interesting. I remember some very intense conversations over Moby Dick. It’s a big and messy book, which swings around in a lot of directions. If you haven’t read it, I can tell you that it’s far more than just a tale of poor obessed Ahab. We had great debates about just what Melville was up to.

As time went on, the cast of characters of the club changed – new people came in, old people dropped out. My apartment became a kind of ritual gathering place, a backdrop that people took for granted. They would come in, take their shoes off, array themselves about the couch and chairs, and take turns holding forth on whatever book we’d all just read the week before. In most peoples’ minds the apartment was, I think, simply the place where they went for the book club. In the evolving culture of the group, the notion that somebody actually lived there seemed to grow abstract.

None of which bothered me, at least on a conscious level. I liked and trusted my friend, the one who had started the book club, and so I sort of mentally tuned out the occasional rough or quirky characters who would show up in the mix from time to time. This went on for quite a few months, and I think I just integrated the weirdness of it all into my life. It became something I stopped thinking about consciously, like a strange street sculpture or boarded-up old storefront that you walk past every day without really seeing anymore.

Then one day a man came to the meeting who had never before attended. When somebody told him he was supposed to take off his boots (it wasn’t me – interestingly, it was never me after the first few meetings), he just looked at them like they were crazy. “That’s ridiculous,” he said in an insulted tone, and went to take his seat in the living room.

At that moment something in me woke up – suddenly, forcefully. That was the last day the book club ever met in my apartment. I told my friend that I was dropping out of the club. I think I told her that I simply had no time, had become too busy, something gracefully vague and suitably delicate.

I have no idea whether she continued the book club elsewhere. I never asked her.

3 thoughts on “Space invaders”

  1. Since the time I lived in Japan, I’ve preferred to wear the kind of shoes that are effortless to step into and out of, without ties or laces. I think taking your shoes off when you enter a house is a great custom. I just wish they built genkans in U.S. houses and apts.

  2. I do not remember the shoe incident. I just remember that the people who were first involved could not and did not deal with deadlines, like reading one book a month. Thus, they decided to read books solo — without the sharing in a book club format. I have continued the book clubs elsewhere with many new people and new configurations. I guess book clubs in many respects are about manners, commitment to reading and sharing….

  3. Ah, so you have outed yourself as the kind and gracious friend in my story. 🙂

    Of course you don’t remember the shoe incident. I never told you about it!

    I completely agree. Any social gathering is about manners and commitment to sharing, well before it is about whatever official theme is involved.

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