Out of Town, out of time
TIMES CHANGE," Michael Corleone mutters mournfully after his mother assures him that a man cannot lose his family. This bitter wisdom comes to everyone sooner or later. But not everyone has to embrace it as fiercely as the modernizing godfather.
Which is why I felt a shudder of rebellion upon learning that Out of Town News, at once the most demotic and cosmopolitan institution in Harvard Square, is about to go out of business. For Cantabrigians like me, this represents not merely the unpleasant alteration of a familiar cityscape, but a transvaluation of all values.
There was a time when I would drive into the Square two or three mornings a week, park illegally behind the kiosk, rush in hoping the meter maid was on a coffee break, and browse among the foreign newspapers and magazines. I might pluck a three-day-old edition of Le Monde from its shelf, catch sight of a must-read Le Nouvel Observateur, add Jeune Afrique to the pile, and top off the harvest with the most recent issues of Ha'aretz or Der Spiegel.
There was something exhilarating about those hurried expeditions to that crammed little pagoda where all the world's journalism came together. Readers from around the world rubbed shoulders there. The kiosk made Harvard Square seem absolutely Athenian: the omphalos of the world.
In 1994, when the original owner, Sheldon Cohen, sold out to a chain, neither he nor the buyer could have known that the Internet would soon be coming to transform the sociable habits of the newspaper age into the solipsistic activity of scanning a computer screen. As for me, I knew the apocalypse was coming when the new proprietor stopped selling the Daily Racing Form because of a squabble over pennies with the distributor.
Sure, times change. But sometimes creative destruction is really just destruction.
ALAN BERGER 