On the F

Now that I’ve moved to New York, I go to bookstores a lot — they’re like libraries, but without all the poor people. I go to bookstores a lot because, in New York, when you’re riding on the subway or walking down the street or taking the elevator up to your office, you’re not supposed to talk to people. Why? Because, I can only assume, then the terrorists win. There are a few exceptions, like a time when I was on the 6 train and a disheveled man walked into the car and, after the doors had closed and we were shuttling on our way, started to pace up and down the train and explain, quite loudly, how he was going to kill all of us.

None of my fellow passengers batted an eye.  Apparently, this was a rather common occurrence.

When you’re not informing your fellow subway passengers of your plans to murder them, you’ve got to keep yourself occupied.  I tried reading one of the free dailies they distribute at subway stations, Metro New York or AM New York, but with articles like “Side-boob extravaganza!” or “Fly into the new year!” — admittedly, not an altogether odd headline, except that it was accompanied by this photo:

I don't know whats going on here, but I don't like it.

— I decided that just wasn’t going to do. No, that wasn’t going to do at all.

As it happens, New York is a mecca for bookstores, both independent and chained (incidentally, Mecca is the new york for meccas). For example, there are several outposts of Shakespeare and Company, an independent bookstore that borrows its name from the famed English-language bookstore and Beat-generation literary hangout located in Paris, across the Seine from Notre Dame. Barnes & Noble was founded here in 1917, and proclaims its flagship store on Fifth Avenue as the largest bookstore in the world, though they don’t specify by what measure. The Strand, another independent bookstore just a few blocks away, also claims that title, stating that their 18 miles of shelf space out...shelf any other bookstore in the world. They confiscated my yardstick when I went in there to fact-check, so I’m not yet in a place to dispute this.

And then there’s also Borders, the ugly duckling of the chain bookstore world, the little engine that just barely could. I visited the Borders in Columbus Circle with one of my friends a week or two before Christmas. I had just finished reading Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of the Private Life, and, spying it on the bookshelf, I told my friend how highly I recommended the book (I really do — you should pick it up as soon as you get a chance): “Bill Bryson is possibly the greatest author I’ve ever read,” I think told him as I leafed through a copy. “You have to read this book.”

Before I knew it, a woman browsing the bookshelf next to me turned around and tapped my shoulder.

“Which book?” she asked, and I was taken aback: the unwritten code of forbidden human contact had been broken. A stranger had just spoken to me — in New York City! I looked to my friend for help, as if to ask, what do I do?! The woman must have sensed my uncertainty, and she laughed, a kind of disarming, “Oh, silly me!” laugh that signals you realize you’ve transgressed the laws of normal human behavior, but can’t we all move past that already?

“I overheard you telling your friend about a book you like, and I just love (love!) to get book recommendations from people at bookstores!” she said, her motherly voice tinged with a slight Tennessee twang. “Which book was it that you were looking at?”

This is what the book looks like.  You

might want to print this up for reference.

I pointed to At Home (a book which — did I mention? — I can’t recommend enough. It has a bright red cover, so you can’t miss it at the bookstore). She inspected the book and nodded in approval. I thought I was done with the interaction, and could rejoin my friend.

But she turned back to me. “What other books would you recommend?” she asked. And then she laughed again. “Oh my, how rude of me! I should introduce myself. My name is—” and, I kid you not, this is was her actual, God-given, you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up name: “—Lisa Treasure.”

Lisa Treasure. It’s a name so trite, oozing in such kitsch that I imagine it's what Thomas Kinkade might call one of the characters populating the villages of overwrought nostalgia he's made a career of painting.  Or it’s the kind of that's-not-really-a-name you would expect to hear for a Bond girl, alongside Honey Rider and Holly Goodhead. But, no. Here was Lisa Treasure, live, in person, and she wanted to know what books I liked.

So I gave her a few titles, and my friend added a few titles that he enjoyed. Then Ms. Treasure proffered her recommendations, but she added a caveat: “Now, I’m a God-fearing woman just like the rest of us...” she said. I paused for a moment, as I was neither god-fearing, nor a woman, and braced myself for some Max Lucado title, the kind of mass-produced, artificially sweetened pulp that leaves you with the aftertaste of regret for days.

Lisa Treasure continued, “...but I actually enjoyed this book.” Now I was intrigued. What could this book be? What tome could this god-fearing woman have believed she would never enjoy? I tried to guess: The Golden Compass? The Satanic Verses? The God Delusion? Or perhaps it was that anti-Christian hate-fest, Matilda? 

This could very well be story of the ant-Christ.  

But you don't have to take my word for it...

But no, it was Powerful Prayers, "by Larry King of all people!" she said. "He’s doesn’t even believe in God!”

Powerful Prayers, Lisa Treasure told my friend and me, describes the role of prayer in different religions. “It’s fascinating when you think about it,” she said, “because you’ve got all these different religions, and the one thing they all have in common is that when you need to reach out to someone — to God, or Buddha or Shiva or whoever — you pray.”

I’m not a religious person. I don’t know whether there’s a god, and I highly doubt that praying has any demonstrable physical effect on your life. But there’s something to be said for the psychological comfort of cultivating a relationship with someone familiar, someone who — like any well-written fictional character — can feel even more real than an actual, physical, living person.  It's the comfort that comes from knowing that, no, I am not alone.

Finding this comfort is all that much more difficult because these kinds of everyday, superficial connections are so taboo in New York. Life here is, for the most part, a rush from one location to another. You’re busy, your friends are busy, and when you do attempt to strike up a conversation with, say, the girl sitting next to you on the subway, she looks at you with the same distrust and disgust with which she regarded the mariachi band who had jumped into the subway car a few moments before and started playing, which similarly forced her to, sigh, remove her iPod headphones and see what they wanted from her.

But New York surprises me. Despite its reputation for being cold and unwelcoming, impersonal and overwhelming, and even though you’re not supposed to talk to the millions of strangers around you, humans are social creatures. We find other, more subtle ways of sharing the human experience — an experience that can otherwise be a long, lonely march across time — with those around us.

Sometimes it's something as simple as the laugh I shared one night with the passengers across from me on the F train. The woman sitting next to me would repeatedly doze off, slowly lean on my shoulder, wake abruptly, straighten herself up, and then proceed to doze off and lean on my shoulder again. This routine repeated for thirty minutes, and served as a source of entertainment for me and the rotating audience of passengers as we rode along.

One man was particularly attentive, his gaze following the woman sitting next to me as she moved up and down. We would catch each other's eyes, trading knowing glances, as if to say, So you're watching this too?

Isn’t this just hilarious, I responded with a smile. The woman was beginning to repeat the cycle, her head slowly listing toward my shoulder.

Look, look! There she goes again! he smiled back.

Too funny, I smiled in return.

Then we pulled into a stop and he got up to leave, but, before he stepped out of the car, he nodded back at me: Well, so long, friend.