Bleak House on Mykonos

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

MYKONOS, Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—10/11/10—The only foreign-language bookstore on this Greek, Cycladic island, Mykonos, which I have this year been visiting for half a century, closed its doors yesterday. Forever.

For the second year running, its owners, old acquaintances (see www.GreeceTraveler.com, the chapter on Mykonos), had run the shop at a loss: rents on Mykonos are astronomical. A young married couple, they are no longer able to “offer this service,” free of charge, to the thousands of seasonal visitors; the small cohort of year-long expatriates.

“No one reads any more, anyway,” said the husband to me yesterday evening, when I went into town to buy, from him, my weekend copy of The International Herald Tribune. “Customers come in asking for e-readers, iPods.”

Two Greek-language bookstores will remain open, at least for the moment, though I’ve been the only customer in each when I’ve visited both this year. But the one shop that sold my own books-still-in-print will, come the winter, go the way of the island’s brown-bread, wood-oven bakeries, its working windmills, its still-weaving weavers . . . and the Dodo.

The only true “camera shop,” selling cameras which require actual film, also closed this year, turned into (yet another) fast-foodery.

So, of course, this fall, the book I brought along with me to read while traveling was Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. Since no one reads any more, since everyone’s packing a “Kindle” full of Danielle Steele or Stephen King, and a compact laptop to check up on the Ryder Cup, the decline of the dollar, I would be toting . . . Dickens.

And, even though I “read literature” at university, and took two higher degrees in philologia, as the Greeks would put it—“the love of the word”—getting into Bleak House was, at the very outset, a struggle for me.

I felt at first like an unbroken horse faced with halter and saddle. I read a few pages, and put the book down in frustration. My 21^st-century nervous system balked at the author’s mid-19^th-century pace and diction.

“I’ll never get through this!” I exclaimed to The Devil Bat (my life’s companion, otherwise known as mild-mannered jazz musician, Dean Pratt). He was without comment. He knows better.

Again, I picked up Bleak House. By the second chapter, I was besotted (as they still say in the UK).

Here is a passage from Page One, Chapter One (and, Dear Reader, there are some 961 pages in the Penguin edition I brought with me):

“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green airs and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex Marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.”

And Beware, Reader: this is not a book for skimming. By the end of that first chapter, if you are “a reader” such as I, or even greedier, 961 pages will not suffice. I roared, I wept, I bit my nails, I hung upon a cliff, I burned the midnight oil (The Devil Bat snoring peacefully by my side, Count Basie on his headphones): I skimmed not, nor faltered. I followed through, faithfully and rapturously, to the conclusion of the case of the wards of Jarndyce.

This September 13^th, I was 59. Next fall, I will be 60. I have come to that place in the life of a Person of Letters when I know my ways are the old ways, and that they are receding. I am what passes for “literate” in illiterate America. I am a person acquainted with the subjunctive and the semi-colon. I am no longer quite of this world, and happy enough for it.

But, next year, “God willing and the crick don’t rise,” I will have nowhere on Mykonos from which to purchase my Herald Tribune; and, shortly, very shortly, there will be no Herald Tribune to purchase anywhere.

And, in parting from my dear old friends at “The International Press” here on Mykonos, as they cleared out their stock before giving up the shop, I handed them a card. “It’s my new magazine,” I said. “Weekly Hubris.”

“Oh, said the young wife! Where can we find it?”

“Online,” I replied, adding insult to injury.

Fog filling the tiny, white-washed lanes of Hora, Mykonos; fog obscuring the last, furtive activities of the little family in the tiny, foreign-language bookstore as the son of the family turns out the lights for the last time, takes down the hand-painted sign, and shoots the bolt in the lock. Fog misting the face of the young matron trying to make out the e-address on the foreigner’s business card. Fog . . . .