It’s hard to argue against convenience.
If a friend of yours wanted to get from Montreal to London, what would you say to convince them to take a boat rather than a plane? And not just any boat, but, like, a sailboat.
“Would the boat be faster?,” your friend asks. They apparently have a very loose grasp on basic things.
“No, no, much longer. It would take around a month longer to get there.”
“Damn. Ok. So, is it crazy cheap?”
“Actually it’d be a fair bit more expensive.”
“I see,” they say as they question the future of your friendship.
“There are two good reasons to opt for the boat despite, y’know, the time and money stuff,” you might say.
“OK.”
“So, well, the money you spend on the trip could go to an independent sailing company run by Montrealers for Montrealers instead of the besuited execs of Air Canada or whatever. You’d be directly helping a small, enterprising community of sailors continue a long tradition.”
“A long tradition of crossing the Atlantic by boat? Maybe that tradition needs to die? Wait, actually, how is that tradition still alive?”
“Nevermind that. Ok, but the tradition must be preserved because - and this is the real important point - crossing the Atlantic by boat is a special experience that cannot be replicated by just taking a plane. On a plane you don’t run into squalls or see belugas or risk scurvy. The plane is yet another soul-deadening aspect of modern life. Everyone is unhappy on a plane. They’re barely alive up there. The boat, though, is rife with the spontaneous stuff of life. You will experience unexpected things! Waves! Other things! Have thoughts and feelings you could not otherwise have. You won’t regret the boat even though the boat doesn’t get you to London directly and you’ll have to travel from the coast inland (and we recommend you do so by horse and buggy rather than by car by the way). The experience of getting there will be worth much more than whatever inefficiency, extra expense, and inconvenience you suffer.”
Your friend has left now. They’ve walked away. They might delete you from their phone later.
Not only is it hard to mount an argument in favor of inconvenience, but it’s often hard to see why you would try to do so in the first place. Plenty of things are already terribly and insufferably inconvenient. Life itself might be described as a barrage of inconveniences strung together end to end and interrupted randomly by actual catastrophes and short-lived bouts of luck. If given the opportunity to choose between a small inconvenience and a large one, it makes excellent sense to always opt for the former.
To experiment (out of curiosity) with choosing a larger inconvenience rather than a smaller one, we decided some random Saturday last summer that we would try to buy a deck of playing cards in the real world. We would not make use of the website that everyone uses to buy everything. We would not use a website of any kind. We would pretend that we lived in an earlier version of the world, head outside, and try to buy a simple deck of cards.
It took nearly an entire day.
We went to toy stores that didn’t have cards in stock. We went to department stores that had cards in stock, but couldn’t locate them in the store. We covered blocks and blocks of the city in search of a humble set of cards before, despondent, we went into a dep to buy a Diet Coke (to soothe us) and spied a solitary deck of cards hanging on the wall. They cost close to five dollars and we gladly snapped them up. Out of morbid curiosity, we checked the price of cards online when we got home. A box of twelve packs of cards is eleven dollars online - so we paid a four hundred something percent premium for these real world cards.
Were we glad to pay this premium? We were not. Did we enjoy the experience? We did not. Do we cherish those cards in a particular way as a consequence of the effort we spent acquiring them? No. Shut up. We actually aren’t really sure where those cards are right now. If an occasion to play cards comes up in the future, we’ll have to decide again whether we want the small inconvenience of using the online stores that have every possible deck of cards imaginable or the large inconvenience of hunting down what seems to be an incredibly rare and costly commodity in the difficult to navigate real world.
Can you guess what we’ll decide next time?
Yeah, no, we’ll probably go back to that dep in the hopes they’ve restocked the cards. Is this a sign of a particular pathology? Maybe, but you’ll at least be relieved to know that we have never tried to convince someone to sail across the Atlantic rather than fly. Nor have we attempted to persuade anyone to follow in our footsteps in the playing card department. We tend to keep ourselves to ourselves. We think that one’s commercial decisions - like one’s religious convictions - are probably always better left private.
AND YET!
And yet we buy all our books in actual bookstores and, of late, almost exclusively from one small, independent bookstore on the corner of Duluth and Drolet. It’s called De Stiil. We think De Stiil makes a good case for the unexpected merits of inconvenience despite everything we’ve said above.
We could, here, appeal to the virtues of supporting a local business - but that might be non-starter. A preference for local as opposed to global or at least non-local businesses is an ethical stance that is hard to argue someone into. There are a host of reasons why supporting a local business is holistically better than the alternative (i.e. local businesses employ local people, pay municipal taxes, participate in creating a sense of community, have a vested interest in treating their limited set of customers with care and attention), but even if you see the merit of these reasons they might not motivate you. Veganism has a lot of very persuasive reasons in its favor, but we find ourselves motivated to eat animals often all the same. We actually can’t even think of a single good reason why an animal should have to suffer for the sake of our taste buds, but we remain non-vegans regardless. (We never said we were good people.) Localism is a similar sort of thing. Reasons, no matter how good, do not always motivate.
We could, also, wax poetic about LITERATURE and booksellers of old. We could opine about the romantic allure of browsing the stacks as if browsing websites weren’t a thing. We could talk shit about how big box bookstores like Indigo are quickly turning into emporia for housewares, James Patterson novels, and whatever BookTok is into this month (and also, weirdly, subject to cyber attacks). We could rage against that store named (fittingly) after a rainforest in South America that has been, is being, and will continue to be dessimated by rapacious greed and a wholesale disregard for future generations. But these arguments presume that one has the luxury and privilege of abundant free time and money to sacrifice for the sake of the intangible and ephemeral delights of happening upon novels on actual shelves.
What options are left then for arguing that the inconvenience of schlepping one’s tired body to De Stiil (or any other small, independent store run by pleasant, dedicated, and interesting people) is a worthwhile activity?
Maybe we should argue that opportunities for a certain kind of inconvenience are becoming rare. The moral universe may be long and (hopefully) bending towards justice, but the commercial universe is short and bending hard towards a certain version of convenience, efficiency, and uniformity (often built on the back of under-compensated or otherwise questionably-treated laborers). Commercial enterprises and their commodities are, moreover, increasingly homogeneous and interchangeable. One wouldn’t want to be woken from the supreme convenience of half-consciousness by anything novel. Whether you are in one store or another, on one website or another, looking at one product or another, is barely noticeable. It is not, we don’t think, a sign of hysteria to suggest that the days of (commercial) inconvenience, idiosyncrasy, and surprise are numbered. Cheap indistinguishable products housed in undifferentiated rooms is a possible and foreseeable future. It might just be the present.
Walking around De Stiil, though, feels like entering a space that hasn’t yet got that retail memo or succumbed to its logic. Despite the unobstrusive music and sort of Apple Store minimalist aesthetics of the place, there’s an irreverance to the shop that is striking.
Four tables at the center of the store display old and new, canonical and experimental, popular and unknown books that seem selected by an obscure and provocative spiritual force (Mark Doty’s prose?! ). These books showcase an eclectic taste, but not an esoteric or even an especially pretentious one. They are almost all books that inspire you to page through them even if they manifestly aren’t your kind of thing.
Beyond the tables, shelves and shelves are devoted to books in translation which, it merits noting, are notoriously unpopular with English readers such that publishers are hesitant to publish them at all in the first place. French, German, Arabic, Dutch/Scandinavian, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese translations are represented and the books represented here aren’t even exclusively the Times bestselling names of the moment. There are, of course, heavy-hitting award-winners - but also less lauded and widely recognized authors from all over.
Beyond the books in translation, even the general (sort of) fiction section is an assortment of unusual and unlikely books that we alternately never knew existed, were certain went out of print, forgot about entirely, or are pleasantly surprised to encounter.
There also seems to be a commitment across the shop to offering an author’s entire back catalogue rather than just their most recent offering which is both rare and valiant. (We are fairly sure that even Joan Didion’s estate does not possess copies of her novel Run, River - but De Stiil does (or at least did).)
De Stiil almost feels like a mistake. Like the awful powers that govern what can and cannot exist in the world were distracted on the day it opened and have remained somehow distracted since. It is simply nice to be there.
Is any of this a compelling and full reason to inconvenience yourself? Did we argue well and thoroughly enough?
No. Of course not. There’s no argument against convenience.
The small pleasures we get from eyeing books we have never seen and will likely never see again, overhearing excited conversations about what the clerks have just read or watched, surreptitiously spying other customers pick up books that we know are great, or happening upon an austere-looking book that seems full of grand ideas and stark ambitions (e.g. Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina) isn’t something that can be argued for.
Inconveniencing oneself unreasonably in pursuit of the possibility of some sort of value or unexpected pleasure no matter how small is a lost battle, but it warrants saying that “inconveniencing oneself unreasonably in pursuit of the possibility of some sort of value or unexpected pleasure no matter how small” might also serve as a decent description of most worthwhile things in life. Pursuing a passion, maintaining a friendship, searching out love or lust, learning something, going to events, engaging in a hobby, trying an unfamiliar activity, travelling somewhere, reading books (or an overlong essay ostensibly about a bookstore), and a host of other ultimately great things are frightening impositions, inconveniences in the extreme that violate the sanctity of habitual and ready ease. None of these inconveniences might be worthwhile in the end, but they are - when one has the resolve and good fortune to be able to pursue them - worth the chance that they might be worthwhile in the end.
Arguments are cheap and abundant. Opportunities to see that, as Louis MacNeice puts it, the world is “incorigibly plural” and to “feel / The drunkenness of things being various” are rare. De Stiil - like many other small places scattered across this city and others - is one such place. We are grateful for it and its inconvenience.
Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have to go see a man about a boat.
Amazing, true and funny article. Loved it!
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