From “World of Wonders: A Spirituality of Reading” by Jeff Crosby
I never asked for her name, and I wish I had. I never saw her again, and I’d hoped I would.
It was a cool autumn Saturday morning in the university community where my wife and I operated a bookstore in the early years of my career working in the world of words. A woman was browsing in the store’s literature section with her back to me. As I approached to ask her if I could be of help she turned, and I saw two deeply blackened eyes staring back at me. Other seemingly fresh abrasions were clearly visible on both of her cheeks. I also saw tears in her eyes as she asked, “Do you have Albert Camus’s The Stranger or The Plague?”
Although I knew of the French-Algerian novelist and moral philosopher’s work from reading his books as an undergraduate just a few years prior to my encounter with this young woman, Camus’s works were not among those I devoted shelf space to. After responding with the words no bookseller wants to utter – “No, I’m sorry, we do not but we could order them for you” – I asked the young woman, who I presumed to be an Indiana University student, “Are you okay? You seem to have been hurt?”
She deflected my question and instead proceeded to speak with restrained emotion about the absurdity of life, the fallenness and hopelessness of the world – all themes that Camus powerfully addressed in his novels in the 1940s and 50s, including the two she was searching for.
I will never know what had happened to that woman, but I do know that in the midst of whatever trauma and pain she had encountered she made her way to a bookstore seeking in the pages of books what she believed were either answers to, comfort for, or validation of her experience in the world.
And she was not alone then in doing so. Nor are we today when we seek similar outcomes from our reading.