Aaron Lake Smith
Journalists are the livers of society, organs that break down the myriad poisons of war, revolution, and labyrinthine legal complexity for a body politic. They are also the livers in another sense—their professional function is to go out and live, to experience, explain, bear witness, and provide insight. On a spectrum of literary occupations ranging from the ideal of the hermetic, solitary writer, fully engaged with the imagination all the way to the the over-socialized drinker and raconteur on the other, most journalists fall squarely in the middle. These great compromisers are trapped forever in limbo between living and writing. On a rainy Monday afternoon in Burlington, Vermont, I wander past the whole-grain sandwich shops and slick ethnic bistros of the Church Street pedestrian mall, drawn by invisible magnets towards the retail zone’s centerpiece—Borders bookstore, a substantial brick building as set against time as the Parthenon. A couple of guys stand around the entrance holding up black and yellow cardboard signs: Up to 40% off all stock! Everything must go! I’ve come to pay my last respects to the dying giant.