I had read him for years before I ever stood in his shop. You would think that would make it easier. It made it worse.
The Painted Porch sits on Main Street in Bastrop, in a building that has been standing for something like a hundred and forty years. Ryan Holiday and his wife Samantha run it, and they stock only books they actually love, which means the shelves are short and the batting average is high. I had built the whole visit up in my head for weeks. I knew which passage I wanted to mention. I knew the question I wanted to ask about a translation. I had, embarrassingly, a small speech.
None of it survived the door.
What happens when you meet the work that changed how you think is that your mouth stops cooperating. I stood in the middle of the room holding a book I was pretending to read, aware that I had gone quiet and unable to do anything about it. A person who writes constantly about ego and about doing the work rather than talking about it, and here I was, unable to manage the talking part.
The gap between the version of yourself who imagines the moment and the one who shows up for it is wider than any book warns you.
So I did the one honest thing available. I stopped performing and I bought books. Three of them. I did not pick the rare or the clever titles. I picked the ones I knew I would actually reread, which is its own small Stoic test if you think about it.
Samantha stamped each one and signed them for me. The stamp is a plain, good mark on the title page, the kind of thing that turns a copy you could get anywhere into the specific copy you carried out of that specific room on that specific afternoon. I have them on the shelf where I can see the spines. I did not say my speech. I got the better souvenir anyway.
If you are a reader who has been meaning to make the drive, make it. Buy something. You do not have to be smooth about it. The shop rewards the showing up, not the script.
The shop
The Painted Porch Bookshop
An independent bookstore on Main Street in Bastrop, Texas, co-owned by Ryan Holiday and Samantha Holiday. A tight, hand-picked collection of their favorite books, in a restored historic building an hour east of Austin.
Visit thepaintedporch.com →