Some Reflections from a Bookstore

Just recently, I encountered the book of E. M. Cioran at a bookstore. His literary phantom eluded me at first as if he was shy, or perhaps, more precisely, too self-absorbed and proud to even consider and regard the literary thirst of a minor writer such as me. The book – I already forgotten the title – was situated on a top shelf in the philosophy section (should it be there?); I was thus forced to tiptoe as high as my toes would take me as if I was reaching for the hand of God. After obtaining the book, I immediately secluded myself in a corner of the bookstore like a mischievous boy who just stolen a precious toy; a Malay woman – whom I have seen there before – was sitting beside me; her mind seems to be lost in the cheap-blissful-romance created by an author whose banal and superficial mind one can only assume has never read a single line by Cioran – the name Cioran itself must sound alien, disgusting, repulsive, and too elitist to the author’s common literary taste ( is the taste of the common reader to be considered a taste at all?). Let us not bother the common reader and their common imaginative world. Let us return to the classics rather the contemporaries; let us return to the individual writers rather than the social writers; let us return, in the end, to our own imagination – with the guidance of an imaginative writer – rather than to the imagination of others (if they do have an imagination).