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A Man Walks Into a Bookstore …

Did I come to Maastricht for a bookstore? It depends on our starting point. 

No, I didn’t trek all the way to Europe to visit the Boekhandel Dominicanen, which is inside a church originally constructed in 1294, more than a century before Johannes Gutenberg invented his moveable-type printing press to make that future possible. But I’m not sure I would have added Maastricht to my itinerary if not for its one-of-a-kind bookstore (it hasn’t been a functioning church since the French Revolutionary Wars spilled over into the Low Countries and the French used it for horse stables).

The bookstore sealed the deal when, looking for an appealing place to spend a couple of days before moving on to Dusseldorf, I learned about it as a point of interest in the small geographically quirky city (in a spit of the Netherlands wedged between Belgium and Germany) that earned positive reviews for walkability, atmosphere, history and scant tourist hordes. 

Now, as it turns out, the Bookstore Dominicanen is not an unforgettable bookstore for the purpose of finding books to read. This wasn’t all that surprising. I don’t think it would qualify as a great bookstore even if you read Dutch, which understandably appeared to account for about 75 percent of the inventory. Perhaps because most of its square footage is vertical, it doesn’t have a huge selection. It makes up for that lack of quantity in the quality of the selection, to a point. It’s decidedly less reliant on a handful of best-sellers than the typical airport bookstore, for instance. But it’s not a temple of deep cuts and staff picks. And because of the narrow aisles and people (like me) taking photos, even on a Monday morning, it is not super conducive to browsing. 

But it’s a good enough traditional bookstore to come away happy from a once-in-a-lifetime bookstore experience. 

Because the Bookstore Dominicanen isn’t really about finding something to read (I walked out with Gareth Rubin’s Holmes and Moriarity). It’s an endearing tribute band of a bookstore, a celebration of books—look where we can put a bookstore!  Take your Index Librorum Prohibitorum and shove it, Pope Paul IV, here’s a fantasy novel about a kickass demon-keeping teenage witch. In that, it succeeds wildly. I walked away happy because it brought me back to all of the amazing (and, yes, better) bookstores in which I’ve gotten lost over the years. 

When I lived in the Pacific Northwest, Powell’s in Portland and Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. When I returned to visit over the years, Cloud and Leaf, the perfect vacation bookstore in the out-of-the-way beach town of Manzanita, Oregon—three blocks from the ocean, a tiny store somehow always full of books I wanted to read. 

Or Powell’s secondhand bookstore near the University of Chicago, related through the eponymous family to the more famous Portland institution and always full of rare baseball titles when our family made summer trips to Chicago and games at Wrigley Field. 

From an even younger age, so long ago that I don’t remember the names of the individual establishments, if I ever knew them at all, the bookstores in London and Cambridge that were full of Paddington, the Wind in the Willows, Frog and Toad and more. 

The first Borders that opened in Indianapolis was a seemingly miraculous development in an area that was a bookstore desert. Long before it moved to a much larger superstore location with music, café and all the other accoutrements of its war with Barnes and Noble, it was just books. The nooks and crannies turned each section into its own principality, like some Holy Roman Empire of history, literature and more near one of our many, many malls. 

Even abroad, I’ll wander into bookstores that, unlike the Dominicanen, don’t have any titles in English. The look and feel of the store is familiar. It’s still enjoyable to peruse a shelf. 

I go to bookstores now and wince at the prices, contemplating what I need to cut out of the monthly budget to buy a couple of hardcovers. Yet somehow, to my parents’ everlasting credit, bookstores were places where we, as kids, didn’t need to beg or plead. Sure, they might draw a line when your tower of books grew too tall for you to carry, but they wielded the necessary accounting wizardry to make it work in their budget. 

The rules of the real world never applied in bookstores, which in its own way, is at least as magical as anything you find through the back of a wardrobe. 

In a bookstore, all the more before the internet, you could go anywhere and do anything. You could walk into a store and learn about people, placed and times you never knew existed until that moment. Try finding anything that revelatory at Bed, Bath and Beyond. 

That’s what is special about the Bookstore Dominicanen. It’s celebrates the idea of bookstores—that here anything is possible. Even a bookstore in a church built before the printing press. 

Meeting Kierkegaard in Gothenburg

I’m no more fluent in philosophy than Norwegian or Swedish. I signed up for a philosophy course in college, but if a lecture falls at 8 a.m., does it make a sound? Not that I recall. 

Aristotle, Descartes and the rest aren’t wholly unknown names, but I’m on much firmer footing when it comes to debating Mays and Aaron or differentiating Stiles from Catchings. 

That also holds true for Søren Kierkegaard, who I’ve spent more time thinking about in the last month than the preceding four decades. The Danish philosopher came up often in the cultural histories of Scandinavians and the Nordic region that I read before a trip to Sweden and Norway. Previously, the name triggered little more than a vague connotation with the sort of melancholic bleakness that pervades Nordic crime fiction. As usual, a fuller picture of his times and work made me curious for more. 

I just didn’t expect to run into him at Skansen Kronan, the 17th century fortress that sits atop a hill overlooking much of Gothenburg.  

I never recall feeling uncomfortable with heights as a kid. Maybe that’s just memory editing, but I remember loving all towers, observation decks, gondolas, etc. I could—and did—ride roller coasters from the time an amusement park opened until last call. But somewhere along the way, increasingly over the past 10-to-15 years, I’ve grown decidedly skittish at even the suggestion of open, elevated spaces. In Edmonton a couple of years ago, I forced myself to walk across the Waterdale Bridge, which soars over a ravine. But I couldn’t bring myself to pause long enough to take a photo, unsure I could get my legs in motion again. 

It’s an irrational fear (maybe most are). As best I can tell, it’s not specifically a fear of falling. Nor is it height alone—the steerage seats are the only part of flying that bothers me. It’s just an overwhelming sensation of openness on too many sides that leaves me frozen. 

Those are the physical manifestations, but it feels somehow more all-consuming. Perhaps life feels naturally limitless when you’re young, so the boundlessness of height is the world as it should be. Whereas with age, as I become ever more aware of the limitations of time and possibility, those same open heights somehow feel more daunting, even threatening. 

More to the point, perhaps the boundless physical space forces me to confront such a pure distillation of my own fears about the limits of time and possibility that I short circuit. 

On this particular day, it hit me walking to the top of the path leading to the Skansen Kronan. The paved path was steep—the sort of path cut centuries ago when no one from health and safety needed to sign off. It was a cold, wet and windy morning, and as these things go in Gothenburg in January, still a long way from dawn offering any natural light. So, not ideal conditions for a stroll. But this also wasn’t the final ascent on Everest. It was maybe five minutes and half a dozen switchbacks. No big deal. But with each turn, and for reasons that had nothing to do with the incline, the next step was harder and harder to take.

Soon, even with the top in sight, it was too much. I knew I could push on. Ascending is always more manageable than descending. But I wasn’t sure I could force myself back down, and that was going to make it decidedly difficult to catch my train to Oslo later in the morning. Frustrated at missing a good view and a good picture, I turned around. 

Maybe Kierkegaard had it right. 

“Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eyes as in the abyss. … Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

Back on level ground, I set off in search of Café Husaren’s giant cinnamon rolls. 

Because as philosophers go, I still find the greatest solace in Douglas Adams. There may be as many existential crises in the “long dark teatime of the soul” as there are in Kierkegaard’s universe. But the world feels more sensible with coffee and a bun. 

A Sunday Sprint

(Photo credit: Steffen Prößdorf)

There was a time when the playoff debate in college football would have consumed my Sunday morning. That it’s a time in the past isn’t meant to judge those busy debating the merits of Texas beating Alabama in Tuscaloosa, a potential playoff without the SEC and other matters.

I don’t even know that they missed anything Sunday that they would have enjoyed.

I just know I’m happier for knowing more about Lou Jeanmonnot than I did when I woke up. And I’m thankful for a final lap and a sprint to the finish in Ostersund, Sweden, that raised at least one heart rate on a sleepy Sunday morning in far away Indiana.

Jeanmonnot is a 25-year-old French biathlete, if you were wondering. Most people wouldn’t have much reason to know her name. I barely knew it before last year, when she finished a solid 11th in the IBU World Cup overall points race. Entering this week’s season-opening events in Sweden, truth be told, I barely knew anything about her beyond her name. Hers was just another name that popped up on the leaderboard from time to time, not one of stars who an admittedly casual biathlon fan followed more closely from race to race.

But several of those stars have stepped away since the last Winter Olympics, Norwegians Tiril Eckhoff and Marte Olsbu Roeiseland and German Denise Hermann-Wick prominent among them. Continuity always ebbs and flows in sports. Short careers, relative to lifespans, mean we watch generation after generation rise, peak and eventually be replaced. Sometimes that’s more discombobulating than others—as with a U.S. women’s national team moving on from the generation of Carli Lloyd, Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan or men’s tennis gradually moving on from Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. Yet the more unsettled the times, the greater the opportunity for something or someone to introduce themselves.

Friday, Jeanmonnot seized her opportunity by wining the 7.5 km sprint in Ostersund.

The sprint is three laps around the course, interspersed with two stops on the shooting range—five shots from a prone position on the first stop and five shots from the standing position on the second stop. A handful of the fasted skiers might be able to win with one miss (each miss means an extra loop around a 150-meter penalty oval), but for the most part, you don’t win without hitting the target on every shot. Jeanmonnot didn’t miss—and skied well enough to finish 8.5 seconds ahead of Norwegian Karoline Offigstad Knotten.

The sprint is purely a race against the clock, like a time trial in cycling. The field of more than 100 starts one skier at a time, a staggered start. Jeanmonnot started 27th, meaning she knew by the time she crossed the finish line that she was the fastest to that point—but she wouldn’t know for sure that she won until the other 70-plus competitors crossed the finish line.

Sunday’s event was different. The 10 km pursuit is a race against people—first one across the finish line wins. By virtue of her win in the sprint, Jeanmonnot started first in the pursuit, given an 8.5 second head start on Knotten. Each successive skier then started according to the time she finished behind Jeanmonnot in the sprint. But 8.5 seconds is nothing in a race spanning five laps and four rounds of shooting. By the end of the first lap, Jeanmonnot was just one part of a lead pack of six skiers who entered the shooting range at the same time.

She hit all five shots from the prone position, but so did four others in the lead pack.

She hit all five shots after the next lap, again prone, but so did German Vanessa Voigt and Norwegians Juni Arnekleiv and Ingrid Landmark Tandrevold from the lead pack.

She hit all five shots after the third lap, this time shooting from the more challenging standing position. But so did Arnekleiv and Voigt. And as those three embarked on the fourth lap skiing around the two-kilometer course of ups and downs, Voigt and Arnekleiv began to pull away from Jeanmonnot. One announcer wondered aloud if the Frenchwoman might be intentionally falling back, saving her energy and managing her breathing to be ready for the final round of shooting. Maybe. Mostly, she just looked tired and cold amid temperatures near 0 Fahrenheit.

Whether strategy or not, Voigt and Arnekleiv each missed early in the final round of five shots from the standing position and set off on their penalty laps. Taking her time—agonizingly so in a sport in which there is a fine balance between giving away seconds on the range in hopes of avoiding them on the penalty loop—Jeanmonnot once again hit all five shots. Between the Friday’s sprint and Sunday’s pursuit, she went 30-for-30 on the range.

Jeanmonnot began her final lap about six seconds ahead of German Franziska Preuss, whose strong skiing had largely erased the deficit of an earlier penalty loop. The Germans had been fast on their skis all week, perhaps winning the weekly wax war that is also a part of the sport. It seemed inevitable that Preuss would now catch her quarry. Sure enough, by the halfway mark of the final lap, Preuss had dominated the climbs and not only taken the lead but opened up a gap of several seconds.

Jeanmonnot’s best hope—and perhaps her strategy all along, if she’s indeed a tactical savant—was to rely on her weeklong strength on the downhill portions near the end of the course. Sure enough, at the course flattened for the final time with the finish line only a couple of hundred meters away, she had closed the deficit and pulled level with the German.

Now it wasn’t about shooting accuracy, ski technology or strategy. Now it was a sprint to the finish line and finding some untapped reservoir to feed oxygen-starved muscles.

Even when the format allows for them, sprint finishes are rare. The outcome is usually settled before those final few meters. Earlier in the final lap, one announcer mused he couldn’t recall ever seeing the 29-year-old veteran Preuss in a one-on-one sprint to the finish. Certainly no one had seen Jeanmonnot at the World Cup level. But here they were.

The final straightaway is divided into lanes. Coming off the final turn toward the straightaway, Jeanmonnot had to go wide to attempt to pass Preuss. As the meters vanished, she inched ahead, first by the tip of a ski and finally by about half a ski length—0.3 seconds at the line.

It was heartbreaking for Preuss, who earlier in the week lost the 15 km individual event by 0.1 second to Italian Lisa Vittozzi (whose own comeback from the yips on the shooting range over the past two years is a story worth its own post). At least that wasn’t a head to head finish, just a race against the clock out of Preuss’ hands in the end.

But the depth of the heartbreak also provided the height of Jeanmonnot’s elation—at least once the Frenchwoman regained any breath after initially collapsing in an exhausted fetal curl on the snow, skis still attached.

It sometimes feels as if the world spends as much time talking about sports—and the dramas, controversies and personalities adjacent to sport—as it does watching competition. That’s hardly a sin. Sports are drama. Narratives engage us, characters entertain us.

And maybe that’s as it ever was, more visible only because of improved communication.

But I can’t help but wonder if the balance isn’t out of whack. Because I don’t know what sports are for—really for—if not the increased heart rate and knot in the stomach of watching someone turn for home and wondering if she will find the will to get there first.

I do know more about Jeanmonnot than I did when I woke up Sunday. I look forward to seeing how she fares next week in Hochfilzen, Austria, as a new season takes shape.

And for that, I’m grateful to stll love sports this Sunday morning.