Vellichor
Vellichor – the nostalgia and temporality of used bookstores; the feeling evoked by the scent of old books or paper, the strange wistfulness of used bookstores.
What a beautiful word, vellichor. It slips through my lips and and the “ka” spoken from the back of my throat, not like a cough, but with confidence and determination. I went to Politics and Prose, a wonderful bookstore in Washington DC a few weeks ago. It is not a used bookstore, but I still felt vellichor – the smell of the 1000’s of book’s papers, the various inks, the cacophony of color as I looked around, the quiet sereneness of every shopper, the collective awe and wonder of all of the possibilities that lay before us = all woven within vellichor.
There are places I feel home and they are, in no particular order, the beautiful country of Botswana, the valleys and mountains of Glencoe, Scotland, standing on the edge of an ocean, sitting in front of a fire with a cup of coffee and a sunrise peeking, forests filled with pine trees and the scent of vanilla on the breeze in the San Jacinto mountains, and after walking through the door(s) and inhaling the deep, ancient scent of trees which are now paper and covers and binding and ink transformed into ideas and love and knowledge and friendship wrapped up in a book…I feel vellichor…I feel at home…in a bookstore.
“Home is where the heart is.”
If that old cliche is to be true, then I have left a piece of my heart sprinkled across this amazing planet. I would never want to collect those pieces or take them back, I want them to be there, outside my body, kind of like my children, only my heart lives as a memory I can bring forth whenever I want or need. Just as music and chorus and scent can invoke memory, so can words and photographs.
Bookstores and books and words on paper evoke within me hope. Possibilities. Dreams. Belief. Joy. And these overflow within my heart, burst toward my brain and seep out as contentment and smiles.
I feel at home with words, whether printed within a book or those that spring forth as I type this semi-nonsensical page. With these words, I wanted some moments to sit with this new word vellichor, to ponder the feelings it brings, and to acknowledge a communal emotion I had never named nor ever heard but felt.
Today, for you my friend, I wish for a few moments of vellichor.