Squint. I will attempt to conjure an impression, a sketch. The best used bookstores will frequently feature at least one chair tucked in a corner or at the end of a back row; often wooden and creaky, always old, and splitting the hair-width boundary of “scattered haphazardly” and “placed just so”. Sometimes a street-rescued couch, sometimes a dining set orphan, sometimes an icon of craftsman pride.

There is no catalog, online or in a salesperson’s desk drawer, that will show you the full variety of these chairs, photographed from five angles in flat light, assigned a barcode and MSRP, stored in a fluorescent warehouse, packaged in plastic and aromatic styrofoam, awaiting purchase and shipment (free for orders above $50). There is no shared source, only a shared destination among yellowing paper and oxidizing ink for this type of chair. Like a retired racehorse grazing the fields of an animal sanctuary or an aging ballerina processing payroll, these chairs have already seen their second act.

The idea of a non-specific chair quietly taking up space across a large swath of stores is intriguing. There is no unoccupied, unpurposed space in retail. If you see a chair in a store, there will be a commercial reason for it. To hear a sales pitch, to sample merchandise, to fill out financing forms — though it will usually be a chair for waiting, in a specifically configured area for waiting. Folding metal in a mechanic’s garage, spill-proof plush in a pediatrician’s office, ass-sanded maple in a train station. Is that what the book store chairs are for — waiting? Why not assume that the formally designated waiting area in a bookstore, if it should possess one, is only located about one specific chair near the front or a strip of carpet laid down over well-trodden wood by the register. What then remains? Simply that these are non-waiting chairs; a non-answer. Would you be satisfied with “bookstore chairs are for sitting?” Let us take the long way around and slide our attention to the backdrop.

Used bookstores differ from those that sell new books in many, but only a few important, ways. For our purposes, let me construct a short and simple opposition between generalizations. The common used book store is curated and indeterminate, the common new book store is stocked and accounted. So much is left to chance within the used bookstore — the owners have had to come across previously purchased paper and deem it desirable, and one must browse the loosely categorized shelves before another with your taste in books and cash in their pocket scurries out of their stinking lair and snatches away the most desirable stuff. A new bookstore may order you an unheld book vaguely identical to many others, but there is only one worn copy of Unamuno’s “Tragic Sense of Life”, held together with beige masking tape along the spine, bearing a cursive pencil signature from 1963. The used bookstore is a breathing entity: always in flux, never duplicatable; always ephemeral, never exact. The configuration is always new, the contents are always old — now and then dancing together. Within the bookstore experience, our motley chairs are more than just stage decoration, they are props, purposed.

The stage is set. Enter the players.

A passionate reader may tell you of the experience of being found by a book, connecting, in some way, with the text, the author, the storyteller. Like a hurried foot catching on concrete raised by a thirsty tree root or the death of a still-young friend, this textual encounter moves through you with the undeniable force of Now. The swift punch of a kind of knowledge that breaks apart the long-tailed image of your Self, acting out melodramas within a personal narrative. You and your sense of “I am” are knocked off the isolated and isolating foundation of surity and purity you rest upon. As with Orpheus’ backward glance, the right book has the ability to undo, unravel your understanding of where you were, are, will go. If this sense can be contained in a word, let it be the terrible and exalted experience of “belatedness”. Being already known. Finding someone already in your hiding spot. It is as though your reflection is a moment ahead of you, like seeing your eyes already closed while you are just starting to blink. Belatedness, for the active mind, is the realization, or rerealization, that in thought or experience, “One has tread here before Me” in all of its horror and wonder. Your uniqueness, conscious or unconscious, is called into question by the opened book. Whether you follow within the furrowed footsteps or walk observantly alongside them, the leafy mud in front of you holds the imprint of another.

The book store chair, then, is a sign and site of a winking suggestion, an invitation to intimacy, available and apprehensible to a reader caught within an intertemporal encounter. An encounter involving the simultaneous speaking and hearing of a voice brought forth by the power of written language. Is it your voice? The author’s? The conjured voice of something in between? Passing through this house of mirrors, the distinction between reflection and source disappears. As you read a text that lay dormant for 5 seconds, years, centuries, the recovered and reactivated word is made flesh in the womb of your own mind. Reading takes for fuel your wills, your memories, your feelings, and places you at once firmly within your own body and without it in fluid conversation with your spectrum of selves. There are many texts that can claim greatness, transcendence, ecstasy, but it is not the mere words, printed and bound, that hold the most-disarming power, but the reading of them. The saying that burns up the source for fertile ash. The experience of everything that is not on the page.

Is it the summary, a footnote, the third chapter, page 294, a dedication that wakes you up? Try as you might to resist, the writing burning linguistic form into the noisy void of your unthought thoughts will enflame you as the page starts to read you back. This connection is the catalyst for the unforgetting of unremembered memories and reinterpretations of unassailable truths. Everything is called into question, is tossed up in the air to be caught again. All is opened up. You are simultaneously outside of time, experiencing the communion of past selves (yours and other’s), and right Now, falling off the always advancing edge of time, the realm of unreflected experience where all is necessarily new. The “not yet Then”. Against such an experience raging within the depths of inner being, it is tempting to think the body is there only to pump blood. No. I offer not a dualism of a mind and a body, but two modes of being — taking in and making sense. Much like the mutual necessity of mind and body (for those that believe it), experience and reflection contain and require each other.

There is a chance that in your final moments of life, in full awareness of the apparent and decisive inevitability of your own death, you will straddle this divide. One foot perpetually moving on the semi-solid bank of experience that shifts in sync with the fourth dimension’s flow to meet your step, the most authentic form of being present; the other foot caught in the downflow of a waterfall of reflection, tracking in vain a droplet of thought back to a source, a reason, a meaning, always pulled down into the homogeneous pool of everything time leaves behind in us to hold and shape. Everything you are existing at this moment; with no access to the future and the past reduced to whispered ghosts. Everything you were, a soft imprint on your perception and understanding of your self, every passing second weathering the shape and overlapping a new muddled mark.

When this divide is but a crack inside your stride, and the well-worn words of a used book force your gaze down to the ever-growing gorge, take a seat. Sit in the book store chair, feel the weight come off your feet and press into the solid base. Your sudden unity of experience and reflection is safeguarded. You, searcher, are not lost in the book, but by chance are found by it. The chair is a resting place that allows you to float between times, thoughts, to try on a new face or give a closer look to your current one. In this room, full with secondhand books and an unmatched chair or two, all curated from a fraction of the surviving past, the field of possible thoughts and thoughtful possibilities is opened to you. If through your squinting eyes you see the outline of something compelling in these words, walk out with a searching heart. You may try and wait and try again, fruitless each time. I urge you to persist. Read widely and deeply. Chase down a beautiful cover, a funny name, an interestingly damaged page. Look under covers and in the margins. Who knows who will find you?