How the Internet Ruins Novel-Reading

This is how the 'net is terrible for my concentration. I read a line from a Colson Whitehead novel about a jewelry store on 47th street in Manhattan between 5th and 6th and immediately think: hey, that’s around where the Gotham Book Mart was. So of course I have to google it and sure enough it’s there on 47th between 5th and 6th, or rather was there when I went there lo these many decades ago. 

I was young with a full head of Irish-black hair. I’d foolishly believed the iconic sign “Wise Men Fish Here” out front, not realizing that wisdom is rarely found in avant-garde literature. Youth is wasted on the young. 

Naturally this reminiscing led me to look up the Wiki entry on Gotham, which led naturally to trying to find the streaming availability of a documentary of the bookstore owner’s life, which naturally led to me reading her NYT obituary, which naturally led to me considering the book I'd bought at the place, poems by Diana Der-Hovanessian (say three times fast) which, at the time, caused me to be instantly smitten by her.  So naturally I had to look her up as well, thinking almost certainly she had died and indeed she did, in 2018 at age 83. 

Things change, especially in the Big Apple. The Gotham shop eventually was sold, then eventually moved to a new building, and then eventually went out of business. 

When I think about the decline and fall of that bookshop as well as the larger arc of the decline and fall of our country, the one consolation is that it’s all in God’s plan. St. Augustine wondered at the why of it: 

Why is this, God my Master, given that you, in yourself, are eternal joy for yourself; and that certain creatures, gathered around you, always rejoice in you? 

Why is it that our part of creation swings between decay and growth, pain and reconciliation? Perhaps because this is the proper mode of being for these things and with this alone you endowed them when from highest heaven to the lowest places of the earth, from the dawn of the ages to their end, from angel to tiny worm, from the first stirring of change to the last, you assigned all classes of good things and all your righteous works to their appropriate places, and activated them at their proper times?