We read to know we are not alone

And other things worth writing on the wall

A couple of weeks ago, a lovely reader commented, “Reading your words makes me feel like I’m not so alone.”

I can’t imagine a nicer compliment. Truly. If I were thinking of giving up on writing Escape to the Bookshop (which I most certainly am not; dabbling around in this little corner of the internet is the highlight of my week!), that one sentence could keep me going another six months, easily. As it is, it totally made my day. And obviously, I’m still thinking about it weeks later.

When I met my husband and we were in our get-to-know-you phase, he told me his favourite movie was Shadowlands. In case you don’t know it, Shadowlands is a 1993 drama starring Anthony Hopkins. It’s kind of a literary romance: the love story of C.S. Lewis, who penned the Chronicles of Narnia and the American poet Helen Joy Davidman. If watching that movie together isn’t the perfect, auspicious beginning to a relationship, I don’t know what is.

Just be warned, you will cry.

One of the lines that has always stuck with me is when Lewis says, “We read to know we are not alone.”

I think I would take it one step further and add this: I write to know I am not alone.

There is just nothing like sitting down and spilling out all the things you didn’t even know were in your heart, feeling a moment of terrible vulnerability as you hit “publish,” and then being totally blown away by how many people say they relate to that one weird thing you thought was only you.

So thank you, reader, for being here, whether we share company in silence or you feel moved to share a little of what’s in your heart too.

As you might know by now, a corner of my brain is always busily at work, designing my future bookshop. My latest idea is to paint “We read to know we are not alone” somewhere in the Wardrobe Bookshop. I know just the spot: a massive concrete ceiling beam that’s pretty hideous, but keeps the whole thing (bookshop, Medieval tower, house) from crashing down in some catastrophic earthquake.

Catastrophic earthquakes are kind of a thing in central Italy.

Random earthquake risk map of Italy. They all look pretty similar. Read the scintillating accompanying paper from three academics in Basilicata here.

The map is pretty pixelated, so I’m not quite sure where Narni is. Yellow? Orange? Red?

You’d think that given my propensity for anxiety I’d be worried about planting myself in an earthquake zone. But I guess this just goes to show that human risk perception is a squishy, incoherent thing. I grew up in California, so earthquakes feel like a familiar hazard. They’re all wrapped up in childhood nostalgia, and I know what to do about them.

When we moved to the Netherlands, I was shocked to find that people here don’t tether their bookshelves to the wall. But of course they don’t. Earthquakes aren’t a thing in Amsterdam. Here all you have to worry about is the sea rushing in and flooding half the country.

Yes, the half of the country that I’m in.

Fun fact. (source)

Anyway, I digress. The earthquake-proof concrete beam in my future bookshop in Italy reminds me of my childhood, but it also feels like it needs some dressing up to make it presentable, hence the idea of painting a quote up there.

Bookshops ought to have words everywhere, don’t you think? One of the (many, many) things I love about Shakespeare and Company in Paris is the abundance of nooks and crannies and irregularly patched walls, and how each and every one serves as a canvas for a snippet of meaningful text. I mean, look at this! You don’t even notice the irregular plaster, peeling paint, or random holes. All you see is the words.

Even the stairs are painted red and emblazoned with poetry.

There's just something magical about words out in the wild, escaped from the pages of a book.

My alma mater, Leiden University, specialises in this kind of magic. And it’s not just the university, it’s the whole city, really. Have you heard of Leiden? It’s a perfectly picturesque little Dutch town about half an hour by train from Amsterdam.

Yes, on a sunny summer day it really looks like that. In winter, it’s more like this:

I’m so enchanted by this place that for the past few years I’ve been writing a novel set in Leiden just so I have somewhere to pour all this gorgeousness I don’t know what to do with otherwise.

Here’s how I became an honorary Leidenaar. When I was nearing the end of my thirties, I got to thinking about things I still wanted to do in my life. I had been fantasising about grad school since before I graduated from university in 2001. I was very Mormon back then, so instead of actually doing the thing I wanted, I went on a mission to Chile, got married, and had a baby all within the next four years. Another baby a couple years later, and then we were gallivanting around the world with toddlers in tow, and the timing was never right.

In 2019, suddenly it was. My baby was starting high school. I’d quit my job the year before to help my husband start a business. We had a great year together, but the business wasn’t exactly a smashing success. So we were at the end of that little project. He’d just started a new job. University tuition for EU citizens was €2000 per year. So why not go for that long-wished-for master’s degree?

The only question: would they let me in? My decades-old BA from an obscure religious university in the U.S. wasn’t exactly impressive as a sole academic credential.

Fortunately, I had an unexpected ace up my sleeve. True, my university days mostly took place during the same century as Downton Abbey. But turns out it’s downright luxurious writing an application essay when you have all those extra years of experience to draw on. Sometimes the thing you’re most insecure about is actually your secret superpower.

That September, I sent my son off to high school and headed off to grad school myself.

I really couldn’t believe my luck. For the next seven months (until the pandemic shut down everything and my university experience became for all intents and purposes an online one; we won’t talk about that) two or three times a week I got up, dressed in what I imagined was an approximation of what 20-somethings were wearing these days (you can laugh here, along with my daughter), and rode the train to Leiden.

One of the first things I started noticing was the poetry written on the walls. I don’t mean scrawled ad hoc as one often (wonderfully) sees in cities. These poems were carefully planned and lettered, and also sanctioned by the city.

They are part of an initiative called Muur Gedichten (Wall Poems). Over a hundred poems in dozens of different languages adorn walls around the city of Leiden. They appear on university buildings, cafés, private homes, anywhere there’s a likely empty wall.

One of the fun things about the project is that the lettering styles and aesthetics vary enormously. Each one is a little work of art, made to match the wall where it resides. Most poems in languages other than Dutch or English have the translation lettered up on the wall alongside the original.

The project used to have a wonderful website with a walking route of all the poems, translations, and background on the poets and their connections (if any) to Leiden. Sadly, the website seems to have disappeared, probably for lack of funding. Here’s a third-party website that appears to be an attempt to reproduce some of that information. It’s all in Dutch, but in case you plan to be in Leiden, it’s definitely worth plugging it into a translator and setting aside an hour to wander the city in search of poetry. Maybe even pausing for a coffee outdoors in the shadow of a poem.

Do you have a favourite poem or other writing you’ve encountered in the wild? I’d love to hear about it, wherever you are in the world.

If you’re an ancient luddite like me, reading this on a computer screen, Substack will let you put a photo in a comment. Otherwise, just describe it. Tell me about a time when words on a wall cast a spell on you.