Traveling to Barnes and Noble: Musings about Seattle

You know, I’m not totally sure what it means to write as a traveler would. I suppose that I could write about all of the things that my senses experience: the colors, the smells (hopefully pleasant ones), the conversations, the facial expressions, the words and the music. But I’m quite certain that doing so would get very boring and feel very pointless very fast. The best travel writers aren’t the ones who give endless details. They’re the ones who describe the truth or the paradigm behind what they see. When you read a good travel writer’s work, you learn something about them while also coming to understand something new about their particular destination. Besides, when I go to a new place (or when I sit and try to soak in an old place), sensory details aren’t the things that I notice.

Instead, I find myself wondering what people are thinking, where people have come from and why people are here. At the moment, I’m sitting next to a fireplace in Barnes and Noble. What is the point of a bookstore anyway? Especially a bookstore as big as Barnes and Noble, it seems superfluous to me. College students and, in fact, all residents of the state of Washington have access to some fabulous libraries where books are free. So then, why do we spend time around a bunch of expensive books that we probably won’t ever read, let alone buy? Why do we make the extra effort to travel to University Village to be around books when we could just stroll on over to Odegaard?

This may sound pessimistic, but it seems to me that bookstores are a product of the collision of American intellectualism with capitalism. Here, one man’s thirst for knowledge is another man’s profit. We exchange my hard-earned money for the chance to know something we didn’t know before. In addition, Barnes and Noble make it convenient for us to find whatever we’re looking for. Hundreds of cultures, thousands of years and millions of people are represented here, all categorized and alphabetized for our convenience. We could browse for hours on end or look up what we want and find it in a matter of minutes.

Perhaps these are precisely the reasons that so many people in Seattle like to spend time in bookstores. We like to think that we’re intelligent (a lot of us actually are pretty high up on the intellectual scale) and even more, we like other people to think that we’re intelligent. And so we spend time around books. Seattleites also tend to be some of the wealthiest people in the world. So why would we go to a public library when we could spend all of that cash on books to fill up our own personal libraries? On top of that, we can listen to hip music and sip hip coffee while we sit amongst our future libraries.

Maybe I’m reading into this too much. But it seems to me that a bookstore is actually a rather good representation of Seattle’s intellectually elite culture. If I were to meet a traveler who was wholly new to the Seattle scene and eager to learn about our traditions and basic values, I would send them to Barnes and Noble.