A supermoon shining older and colder than superstition cast a wintry light over London while I hurried over cobblestoned streets to the sound of bells ringing in the white-gloved hands of the sidewalk Santa.
I was headed toward Hatchards, a Piccadilly area bookshop that has been doing business in greater London since the 1700s. As I walked into the carpeted shop, I found the section with the works of Charles Dickens resting on high shelves and long tables, and taking David Copperfield in hand, sat down on a well-worn burgundy leather Chesterfield that felt like the non plus ultra of comfort. While I reread the first page of the classic an orchestral rendition of “Carol of the Bells” stole through the entrance whenever someone entered or left.
I felt a deep sense of belonging in that bookshop, a supreme contentment created by the holiday season, antiquated atmosphere, and the ghosts of all those Dickens characters floating from the stories.
I haven’t always had the luxury of visiting an elegant bookshop in a cosmopolitan city, namely because I had been in prison for most of my life, been right behind the looming concrete walls of a prison in a part of New York State that stayed cloudy, stayed dreary, stayed brutally unsympathetic and impersonal, but most of all, simply stayed. I am occasionally asked how I served a lengthy sentence without breaking down and dissolving into the earth. I reply that I was saved by the novel, spared the destruction of imprisonment because of the novel’s ability to act like a lifeline that can refocus the mind and repurpose intention.
A large part of life consists of the people who come and go from your life. Some people you don’t mind never seeing again, others you do. Books and their characters and the stories they tell become friends who remain. Beacons in the night whose light ushers in a fresh round of hope with each new day.