Whoever Claims to Be Right
Two days in a bookshop. Ana and I planted ourselves at Hugendubel in Munich and didn’t leave—her working through nutrition and psychology titles, me pulling things off shelves with no intention of buying most of them. Gary had reportedly gone missing in Rio de Janeiro, which he later explained in terms that didn’t hold up to scrutiny, but that was Gary.
The one book I actually bought embarrassed me at the register. Paul Arden’s It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be—the kind of title that sounds like it belongs on a motivational poster in a dentist’s waiting room. I was standing between someone with an Amazon river photography book and someone holding an armful of Charlemagne biographies, carrying this thing. Arden had been creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi and was responsible for some of the most recognizable British advertising of the eighties, so he’d earned the right to a terrible title. The book delivered. Not all of it was new, but the good parts were the kind of sentences that clarify something you already half-understood: To be original, seek your inspiration from unusual sources.
Change your tools—it might free your thinking.
And his best: Whoever claims to be right is not right, because they’re stuck in the past, stubborn, boring, and self-congratulatory. Don’t associate with such people.
Also, more simply: Whoever never makes a mistake probably doesn’t do much anyway.
Bought.
I shifted position and reached for Schaut auf diese Stadt, a collection of new Berlin stories I’d hoped would be gritty and specific. Instead it was a parade of writers afraid of cyclists, children, and a passing beggar. All these people living in the most interesting city in Germany, apparently spending their time being frightened by it. I put it down before I formed a fixed opinion.
Berliner populäre Irrtümer—a book of popular Berlin myths and misconceptions—I couldn’t fully get into for lack of local context. But the chapter on ghost subway stations surviving from the division years was worth sitting with, and the account of the cold-war conflict between East and West closing-time laws had the deadpan comedy of all genuinely absurd bureaucratic turf wars.
The second day I drifted through why the next economic catastrophe was imminent, why the 1968 generation had become insufferable in old age, and a chapter-by-chapter dissection of a frozen food ad that apparently failed on every level. Things I hadn’t wanted to know, filed away anyway. The manipulation manual I left on the shelf. Near the back of the store the erotic section shared a wall with the in-house café—seemingly poor planning, or very clever. I glanced toward it. Decided it could wait.
Arden’s last line, which I keep coming back to: If you can’t solve a problem, it’s because you’re playing by the rules.
Not new. Still true. Worth the embarrassment at the register.