The door always creaked like it was in pain when you opened it and slammed shut when you closed it. It made the small break room feel extra quiet and empty. He stood a moment in the echo of the door and tried to think about what he could have done better. Might have done better. He tried to think about what sort of person he wanted to be in this world and how he might bring that about. His doctor told him that he could only control his actions and not the feelings of others. But the kind of person that Per wanted to be was the kind of person who elicited from other people predictable, good feelings.

The cart had some poetry on it too, things picked up, read snickeringly and then set aside. Some people confused reading and literature – they supposed that these two things had a great deal to do with each other. This made for a lot of confusion because it prompted people to believe that reading was somehow the sort of behavior that was inherently good in a moral sense. When in fact the moral value assigned to reading had to do with the creation of the idea of literature, which some people imbued with all the solemnity of the holy when in fact it was a middlebrow bourgeois anachronism created in universities and retroactively applied to some of the greatest works of human history. In that way, reading and literature were the same. Yet in today’s world, reading had diverged even from these modest middlebrow origins and had sunk into some horribly populist activity.

A modern bookstore was perhaps the greatest example of this kind of fallacy. There were no true believers of this new religion, only empty-headed evangelists flogging the idea that all reading was good reading and that anything could count as reading, and anything could be literature, and that any reading was in fact reading literature and therefore morally unassailable, and in this way not merely morally good but also aesthetically good. There could never be a true faithful to such an empty string of logical transformations. Who could ever earnestly go on their knees in the quiet and the dark of their human soul and raise their face up and say to the vast and unknowable gods of that quiet inner darkness, Any reading is good reading.

Per did not read the books that were popular in the store where he worked because those books were books, not literature. They had very little to do with life and would not be read in five years. The books most popular in the store were popular precisely because of the hyper-localized nature of their idiom and the narrowness of their concerns. The books described a mode of life that would be utterly unrecognizable in a year or two. Or worse, they were about a generalized, abstracted version of the past that had been mostly cobbled out of quickly digested research articles and hazy family memories from across the diaspora. The contemporary novel as Per understood it was mostly about the self, but also about things that had happened to a family across many generations but also about Nazis but also about slavery but also about some obscure local historical atrocity that reverberated through to the present day and had shocking consequences for all involved but also about a painter on a train going to Prague and thinking about a bad man she had slept with once or thought about sleeping with anyway.