Little Red Books

The book collection in Little Red Books is growing. The quality is always inconsistent, but its quantity is definitely growing.

Every visit, I reminded myself to bring along a good camera to photograph this excrescent scene. The aisles are getting narrower and narrower. The books are spilling out from the shelves - piles upon piles - erecting unstable ramparts for the shelves. Any contact with the piles could very easily topple it. A friend of mine said how we get to feel like God when we are there... when any slight movement would cause a big disaster... how sneezing is a typhoon.

From this afternoon's visit, I noticed that even the narrow space that was kept clear to give Mr Cock, the owner, access to his desk counter is now blocked. Although a relatively a low wall, he now has to hop in and out of his desk. When he is seated, you can't see him unless he stands up. He appears to me like a comical neurotic building himself a bunker or digging a trench to hide away from the customers. I told him how I could not believe his discrimination of fat people - I mean, how does he expects them to walk through. If this goes on, the store would only be accessible to anorexics and children. The book walls are also blocking up the few aisles which is now part of a labyrinth... when most are cul de sac.

I once told him how despite this peculiar inconvenience, I do enjoy the process of purchasing books here; how I have no choice but to leave things to chance, because of the chaos in his store. And how there were times my 'prayers were answered'; for instance, I once walked in hoping, to find a copy of Craig Owens's Beyond Recognition, which is very unlikely, but it appeared in the middle of a stack. Another time, it was Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicle which I never thought worth buying first-hand.

He insists there is an order, and gave a pretty metaphysical or 'obscurantist' explanation of 'finding ' and 'not finding' a book here. I can't remember exactly how it went.

Later, as he was flipping through a dictionary, he mentioned how those fellows in his Buddhist discussion group failed to understand and appreciate his recent attempt to relate Kantian notion to Buddhism. He said that while they are supposed to be, according to the teaching of Buddha, 'unconditioned', they are too conditioned by this idea of being 'unconditioned'. And he quoted Thoreau on superstition. Later on, he switched, or I should say, we drifted to another topic: how reading of root words had intrigued him lately. I offered him two of my intuitive observations quite sometime ago, the relation of 'respond' to 'responsibility' which both fundamentally implied 'recognition of the other'. How they are different only in terms of their ethics and physics. I nearly wanted to mention 'rhythm' but thought this would complicate the hypothesis.

The second pair of words was between ‘passion’ (which implies certain level of active engagement, eg. 'my passion spurs me on to produce this piece of music') and ‘passive’. The differences between one giving in to the general will, the extrinsic forces, the dictation of one's genetic configuration, the Schopenhauerian Will. Such as giving in to desire, the passion or lust for a person or food, how it actually compromises one to a passive position. Giving in to passion or seduction makes one a passive, regardless of the amount of physical activity. It is a form of passivity with regards to one's desire. It interests Mr Cock enough to promise me his views on these two relations for my next visit.

I made the decision of which books to buy, from the five I was holding, by the amount of cash I had in my wallet, and went back to office.