The Rescuer Read Online Free PDF Page B

that a civilization without books would lose its soul. All that was significant had already been written and was waiting to be read, Harvey said.
    The more ancient the text, the closer to the source of Truth.
    The more recent the text, the farther from the source of Truth.
    In the past several decades since the advent of the Internet, things are ever more swiftly flattening and thinning, Harvey said. You could acquire vast quantities of data but could not recall it after five minutes. You could process such data through your brain only with difficulty. The human brain was (de)volving, with each generation. It was like pouring water on an actual, exposed brain—most of the water just runs off. A few minuscule puddles might be retained but that’s it.
    Harvey was one to talk! Missing part of an ear, a finger, and more recently his right leg had begun to seem shorter than the left.
    * * *
    One day, I drove downtown to Book Bazaar on State Street.
    How disappointing Trenton was! I had anticipated an interesting old “historic” city, landmark buildings, churches—instead, the city center seemed to have undergone an urban renewal of such perfunctory architectural design, or lack of design, that there remained not a single building of interest; all were functional, unattractive storefront, slickly synthetic as a cheap stage-set. But 2291 State Street was at the edge of the city center in a yet-unbulldozed neighborhood of older buildings: basement, first, second, and third floors crammed with books.
    Old books, many-times-sold books, battered books, wetted-and-dried books, a repository of strangers’ dreams to be decoded.
    There appeared to be just one clerk in the store—a youngish man in his thirties with his hair in a ponytail, receding hairline like Harvey’s and wire-rimmed glasses like Harvey’s glasses; within seconds of greeting me, he told me his name: “Wystan.” (“My parents named me for W. H. Auden. They were both English majors at Rutgers. Except now it’s just a weird name no one has ever heard of.”) Wystan wore cargo pants low on his narrow hips and a baggy black T-shirt imprinted with BOOK BAZAAR in red letters. Something glinted at his left ear—a little gold stud.
    Wystan stared at me with a peculiar little smile. Eagerly he followed me along the cramped aisles, chattering and asking questions.
    I had the impression that he was lonely: very likely, few customers came into Book Bazaar and very few who looked like me—(that is, like a university student and not a homeless vagrant who’d drifted in from the street to get out of the weather). When Wystan asked who I was, where I was from, and I only mumbled an inaudible reply, he wasn’t discouraged; with the air of one accustomed to rebuffs he simply changed his tact, and took up other subjects. He boasted to me that one of his duties was to comb through “estate libraries”—cartons of books stored in the basement—he “siphoned off” the very best books—first editions, copies signed by authors like Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Glenway Wescott, Isaac Asimov, Pearl Buck and H. L. Mencken. Once, he’d found a first edition of Innocents Abroad signed with a scrawled signature—just legible as Mark Twain.
    “Did you sell it?” I asked; and Wystan said, snorting in horror, “ Sell it? Christ, no! It’s the gem of my collection.”
    Then, a moment later, “Maybe you’ll see my collection, someday.”
    I worried that Wystan’s employer or supervisor might overhear him, his voice was so squeaky-strident, but Wystan couldn’t help bragging and making me laugh.
    Next, he tried to talk me into coming into the basement with him—“Just to see what a ‘book mausoleum’ is like”—but I resisted. Not that I feared Wystan so much as I feared the airlessness of such a space. With a lurid sort of zest Wystan described to me how he had to crawl along the floor in certain parts of the (“not always dry”) basement, or clamber and