Toby Ratcliffe
L’imagination aide beaucoup l’intelligence.
Bossuet
Though human ingenuity is responsible for our greatest achievements, it also allows us to find uses in absolutely anything. As the world entertains itself in ever shallower ways, it grows increasingly disinterested in what it is becoming: incurious, unwilling to extend its hand, buried under its own self-promotion. This disinterest and detachment from self leads to a dangerous kind of abandon. Remaining conscious, each person today sees signs that speak of a gradual drainage of depth, which we in our habits have been responsible for. Even for those who wouldn’t consider themselves deep, this matters, for the depth that is simply there but never remarked upon still has the ability to make people more or less confident about living. If national particularities are on the way out and considered unworthy of preserving, let us agree and suggest depth as an alternative.
I, frankly, don’t want to be part of any nation that is shallow, however much my feet want to remain on its soil. There is no point erecting reassuring images of religions or nationalities or races, because images themselves are victims of this same malaise of depthlessness. But, just as it was our habits which led to the drainage of depth, it will be our habits which lead to a thickening of our culture through depth.
If the world is too big to have one culture, let us stay wherever we find ourselves, whether in our own country or not, and build cultures not on the basis of nationality but on the basis of depth. This building will not be done by ignoring the past but by imbibing it in a new way, as though it consisted of a multitude of smells. Only then would we be able to remove its heavy grip on us without entirely forgetting it. It would come to us, rather, potently and briefly, for just enough time for us to know what it was; sometimes it will have seduced us. Some will protest that there is nowhere to go in our societies that gives us access to the depth we’re looking for, and that an ingenious means has been discovered of locking depth out permanently. Neither are true. The place which will be our biggest aid in the process of finding depth will be one of the least expected, the humblest and most nondescript: the secondhand bookshop. There are quite a lot of them in this land. Their books contain various degrees of depth and depthlessness, but as buildings, as commercial enterprises, secondhand bookshops are some of the only free places we have left. One is free from the sway of trends and fashions, free from the top-down planned event which makes shrivel the unplanned person, free from the digital, free from the too organised and free from limitless choice without personal backstory. And, when they’re not antiquarian, they’re affordable for those of any means.
It was a gradual process that led me to thinking the secondhand bookshop is both a moral example to follow and a source of depth. I had been to many of them across the country, but it wasn’t until I walked into the remnants of a subscription lending library in Adelaide that I fully realised their potential. This private lending library had resisted the various Library Acts of the twentieth century, establishing free public libraries across the country accessible to all. Like the man who greeted me, its atmosphere was warm and personable. It had resisted officialdom, the hand of the government, but its indexing of books had led it into the same kind of enclosure of the commons as the public libraries. Though containing its own pleasures, it was something of a closed system. The real commons was the secondhand bookshop, which embodies the dynamism of our free relations with one another. The secondhand bookshop also resists the type of curation and messaging that one encounters in new and unused bookshops. It is humble and has to maintain itself with its meagre sales and the hope it inspires in its patrons through its worn parcels of pleasure. It makes sense that people seeking depth would find themselves walking into secondhand bookshops, but it’s unclear if these people ever meet in them. The question of how truth-seeking people meet is one of the hardest questions to be answered, because in today’s world almost everything seems designed to prevent it from happening. It has to be left to faith, striving and the possibility of surprise.
Though I don’t hear many riveting conversations or see many life-changing encounters between humans in bookshops (there are plenty between humans and books), they at least offer us a starting point, a place to breathe freely and reflect on what to do next. They furnish this essay with a topic, which itself might lead to an answer. Though many of you might have already taken home hauls from secondhand bookshops, almost certainly there’ll be something waiting for you in one again if you give it time; and this something might prove revelatory, capable of both redirecting you and society, depending on how you engage with it. It’s not always in search of a masterpiece that we go, but in search of journals, for instance, occupied with questions that have almost entirely left us today. The rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne manages to occupy half of an issue of Meanjin dating from 1981. It’s hard not to admire this Australian journal’s candidness, its tender attempts at understanding, its casual, readable observations. Its patches of chummy navel-gazing and name-dropping can be passed over.
Like everyone else, I became aware of the great difference in the ambience of the two places long before I had the faintest idea of how to formulate it. As I lurched into my twenties, it became clear to me that the difference had something to do with Anderson, with The Bulletin, with the gathering of revered poets in Sydney, with the mustiness of central Melbourne, and with the ways in which Catholic and Labor politics were pursued, as well as well as with climate and topography.
Vincent Buckley in Meanjin, 1/1981, p.7
Here we have intimations of a culture built on depth that has all but disappeared. However, at the expense of distillations, there is a smattering of specifics which can only become quaint with age. The total effect is of something not strong enough to make us orient our habits in response to it. Culture means living with all the particularities of life - the Coles supermarket here, the Woolworths there - but not giving them undue attention. They ought to feature lightly. The growing of roots requires a certain amount of obliviousness, and at the same time, a striving after something simple and pure. To be overly concerned with unimportant specifics on the ground is, ironically, to cut oneself off from a deep sense of attachment enabling one to live with these specifics. We should aim for a sense of attachment we don’t need to remind ourselves of or reinforce. Certain Australians are capable of unique depth because the pressures against it are so strong here on our big island. It’s our deserts and emptiness which throw up in some people a depth few other countries are capable of. It’s also our sense that we will forever be amateurs and interlopers that strengthens us and ensures our intentions are pure, all the while making our deep clumsily eccentric. What plagues our depth is the increasingly central place of the gimmick in Australian society, this travelling of long distances for charity, to take one mild example. Starting as an exception, it seems to have become the rule and then the currency. As its brown pages fall apart in my hands, I reflect that at least the old journals like Meanjin were not like that. They wanted to name our places to remind us that we exist.
Though I only think one can love a book, or anything, to the extent that one sees a person in it, The Oxford Book of Essays appears to me in the guise of a beloved. This was a purchase I paid too much for at a secondhand bookshop in Brisbane. I don’t regret the expense, because this book is a microcosm of what a culture should be. Each essay it contains is written by a person who, in spite of committing their thoughts to paper in the most beautiful English, understands that conversation in its elevated form is superior to writing. Just as great poets make the best prose writers, I am convinced that those who use conversation for the pursuit of truth also make better writers than those who don’t. Though the conversation might not necessarily take place in the secondhand bookshop, the depth-imbued culture we want to develop must be conversational, and these conversations ought to take place in a number of places, where the pleasure of being mediated only by the word can unfurl. Let us go as far as to say that a conversation in pursuit of truth occurring in an unlikely place - a food court or a train - is a means of reclaiming these places for depth. To spread, depth will need a conquering spirit, and profoundly enjoyable conversation will be its method of attack, a kind of modelling by example rather than evangelisation. The secondhand bookshop, thickly carpeted and covered with precarious stacks, will occupy the role of refuge, place of supplies, place of re-strategisation. It also has a role to play in the imagination: it is a space we can return to in our minds when doubts set in, where we meditatively pluck books from shelves and leaf through them while leaning, crouching or standing on one leg. The secondhand bookshop is, in all senses, a preparation for conversation.
What is crucial about the secondhand bookshop is that the books one finds there pass through not only the person who runs the shop, but also the people who have been previous owners. Unless it is written on the first page, it is unclear how or why each owner acquired the book. It is unclear whether the Rabelais was brought home from Poitiers and discarded, or whether it was lovingly read before its owner had to leave it behind before embarking on a new life in France. So many factors are at play in how each owner acquired the book in the language they acquired it in, that it makes sense for us to use this rich convoluted stream, always flowing and having real people with their own stories as its tributaries, as our substitute for tradition. Thankfully, these traditions are often not too far removed from the secondhand bookshops they also flow through. If one finds a book on Chinese calligraphy in the country town of Holbrook, for instance, one can assume there is a small, perhaps two-person, tradition of being interested in that subject in Holbrook. But sometimes the traditions are more directly related to the land and what people do in that vicinity. One finds clusters of books on Antarctic expeditions not far from where Antarctic expeditions depart in Hobart. The central example of tradition is that the vast majority of books in Australian secondhand bookshops are in English because there is a centuries-long tradition in this country of speaking English. The secondhand bookshop provides the necessary breadth, dotted with hefty amounts of frivolity, for a person to avoid narrowness, pedantry and detachment from local people. With so many traditions flowing through them, they are perfect for those who want to figure out what the world is before changing it.
Though clustered in their own way, the secondhand bookshops of Australia appear not only similar to each other, but also to the secondhand bookshops across the world. There is, however, a unique feature of the Australian secondhand bookshop that demands comment: the Australiana section, normally relegated to the aisle on the edges. For its underdog redundancy, sometimes I think that Australiana is worth as much as Poetry, Philosophy, History, Science and Art put together. One could hardly read exhaustively through its abundance of books - about aboriginal rock art, Ludwig Leichhardt and cattle stations of the Northern Territory; the architectural history of Rockhampton; the nocturnal habits of the sugar glider, and more. But to know that it is there, to know that these types of books were once in production, is reassuring to anyone who has lived passionately on this land. This section serves us a buffet of nostalgia that frees us momentarily from our quest for depth. We realise that there is another kind of tempered depth. An unquestioning embrace of the Australiana section helps us to live with our profundity and not die of it. We become grounded, and all our readings of the classics - Plato, Herodotus, Ovid, Tacitus and Seneca - are suddenly offset and legitimised. Though valuable depth-seekers of the past like Robert Hughes and Donald Horne lashed out at the emptiness of their country, they are now, in fact, Australiana as well. Any deep culture that forms here is going to have to reconcile itself with Australiana, while not relinquishing the task of being as the classics were: sharp, heavy and chiselled in stone. We cannot simply study the classics at a remove; we need to develop the non-evasiveness that produces classics. The material for this enterprise is whatever we find on the ground, in combination with our clear-sightedness.
To a certain extent, depth is an add-on because most of us are content with the everyday’s own brilliance. But there are some people who, though appreciative of the everyday - the solitary cups of tea in the winter sun - need more. They find themselves unconsciously gravitating towards secondhand bookshops, distractedly reading tattered copies of James McAuley’s poetry, only to uncover years later, from another shelf, his masterful editorship of a much-changed magazine. Dipping into offerings of the secondhand bookshop becomes a way of observing the passage of time. Those who frequent them also find themselves flicking through art books on the Impressionists to break up all the reading of words and scanning of spines. Most importantly, they resist, by being in the secondhand bookshop, the internet’s questionable intimacy with nearly everything human. As the peculiar fixations of the ABC and the corporate media wash over us, we find solace in the secondhand bookshop. That is where each person has the freedom to direct their own journey among the books their countrymen and women have indirectly passed on to them; that is where the city-country divide vanishes. Our conversations will take place in the spirit of their unforced eclecticism and pluralism of traditions. The arts festivals, quiz shows and touch-starved online world will continue, but we will show the way of a sociability that proves more alluring. It will be just as open as the door of a secondhand bookshop. And, walking in, we will find the depth we were looking for.
