It was a decisively tactile collision, not a dramatic burst of cataclysmic violence, but simply a moment of existing within my own body interrupted by a moment of impact. The side of the car door slammed against my side, and the sound of a sickening crack – my skateboard, not bone – lingered as the car drove away. My shoe landed several body lengths away from me.
If I were to try and make meaning out of this incident (to preserve the illusion that bad things have meaning or purpose), I would say I didn’t learn anything by getting hit by a car, but I did learn from my reaction to getting hit. Specifically – the slim difference between current reality and any number of alternate possibilities. The alternate reality of a couple of inches being the difference between walking away fine and being in a cast for months. These alternate possibilities are always around us: these moments of essentially random difference being a fork in the road decided by a coin flip.
In A Tale of Two Cities, an unnamed child ends up on the unlucky side of that coin flip, and dies after being hit by Monsieur the Marquis, a French nobleman caricatured as a cartoonishly villainous character, who shows more concern for his inconvenience than the child he has killed, blaming the people around him before flipping them a gold coin then leaving. On its face, this scene’s melodrama is so extreme as to be humorous. But it’s not the scene itself that is revealing, but the possible reactions to it. Specifically, whether the reader identifies with the marquis or the child designates how humorous the scene comes off, an identification dependent on age, wealth, and background. For someone that implicitly identifies with the Marquis, the insulation from that treatment obscures the brutally callous undertones of the scene. For someone who experiences callous disregard on a systemic basis, the humor is harder to find. But it is this obfuscation that I am interested in: not simply looking at what is in front of me, but analyzing what it means: how did these things develop, what things does it allow, what alternate possibilities exist(ed), and what might these things simultaneously be hiding and revealing.
It is this approach I am taking to bookpacking: not simply looking at what there is and expecting a revelation, but rather looking for the things that aren’t there but might have been, that exist in the periphery always just barely beyond the field of view.
This same methodology was on display at Dennis Severs’ house, described as “a still-life drama” – a preservation of a lived-in home of Huguenot silk weavers from past centuries. Inside the home lies intentionally quotidian details: beds with the indentation of the people who slept there, breakfasts only half-finished, books dog-eared halfway through. While dramaticized (and accompanied by admittedly tacky sound recordings meant to give the impression of people still living in the house), the house showcases the living conditions of past eras in ways that a museum cannot. Scattered throughout the house are a variety of quotes by Dennis Severs, most of which emphasize the importance of not just looking at the items in the house, but placing them in the context of the time period they are from: how a bedsheet covering a window might have been to help someone sleep, how the chamberpot on the bed exemplifies life without running water, how newspaper articles mean historical events were once the present.
I went into this house with no context and no understanding of its purpose or intention. When I heard the first explanation of what the house’s purpose was, I expected an interactive story-telling exhibit where I’d learn the details of Dennis Severs life spelled out across different rooms, maybe utilizing human actors or some sort of puzzle. The reality was much quieter. There’s no moment of sudden realization of who Dennis Severs was – only hints of what his life might have been like. But as it turned out, I now understand Dennis Severs in a way that I wouldn’t be able to just by reading a biography. The sum of our lives extends beyond our accomplishments, and it’s in the everyday that our life is defined. Seeing the teacup in his morning routine, the books he read, and the artwork he enjoyed represents him as a person rather than as a figure. I’ve always believed that to be more important.
The motto of the house is “You either see it or you don’t.” If you’re looking for a revelation, you won’t find it. The revelation I was looking for was that there is no revelation. The revelation is that you have to work it out. By doing the work of analysis, whether by understanding the perspective we come from or by looking at what appears to be meaningless details, we can gain a more thorough understanding of history. In turn, this allows us to craft (and it is a craft) more realistic alternative possibilities that expand the purview of what we can achieve. Only by studying the revolutions that failed can we imagine their corrections. Only by understanding injustice in the legal system can we imagine justice. Only by learning what it means to be imprisoned can we find what it is that makes us truly free.
Bookpacking is a route to those alternative histories. Walking through the streets of London and visiting the places in A Tale of Two Cities contains minutiae beyond the confines of the page. Were Dickens to try and capture every feature of every location would make the novel impossibly long. For this reason, novel writing is just as much an act of history as the making of a history textbook. Both make selections of detail to craft a narrative, putting some in, leaving others out. This selection is intentional and exists for the purpose of making a narrative out of the many possible ones that exist. But bookpacking doesn’t have this limitation and has details that exist outside of narrative purpose. The smell of a street, the material of a building, the weather of a particular day – these elements don’t always make it into the novel but in real life are unavoidable. And by looking at these details we are able to understand why Dickens made the choices he did so we can better understand his purpose. These unincluded elements can also be used to craft an image we wouldn’t be able to with Dickens’ history of the world alone, as if making new shapes with puzzle pieces not included in the box. Bookpacking thus transcends the limitations of language to add depth to a story in a way that traditional writing on its own cannot.
But these details don’t assemble themselves into new shapes on their own. Visiting the street where Doctor Manette lived doesn’t scream out some new information about the novel. Instead, we have to glean information from these details on our own. We can analyze the roads to see what degree of carelessness must have been needed to hit a pedestrian. We can watch the interactions of the public to see if Dickens’ characterizations of Britons is fair. We can see to what extent Dickens is understating or overplaying the dreariness of a certain building. Limitations of the difference in time between when Dickens was writing and the present adds to the workload of analysis, but does not devalue the practice of bookpacking as one tool to better construct alternative realities.
The revelation is that there is no revelation. Personal tragedies don’t always have meaning. If all you do is look at a room that’s all you’ll see. But every reality contains the makeup of a million alternate realities, some of which are millions of times better than the present. There is something in the makeup of the street, of the conversations in the air, in the weather of the city that – if you look closely enough, can be made into a revelation.