Brief Encounter
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

It was another wet and windy September evening and I was working the late shift at Shakespeare and Company Downtown. It was the fall after I graduated from college where I received my bachelor of arts degree in English literature and theater arts, and I had moved to New York City to chase, in hot pursuit, my acting career.
This was the first time I wasn’t going back to school and I was looking around longingly at the miles of books as the rush of students, reading lists, and fashion floated out the door. The evening back-to-school crowd had thinned and I was the sole cashier at the front register. My manager, a well-read, shop-worn bookie, was counting out the second register. “Don’t be so glum Leora, you can always go to grad school,” he said. He was on to my malaise. A distinguished-looking white-haired gentleman approached my register with a neat pile of books. I said, “Good evening,” but as I started to ring him up, I noticed that he was buying simplified texts of French philosopher Jacques Derrida: “Derrida for Dummies,” “Cartoon Dialogues on Derrida” and “The Illustrated Derrida.”
My youthful arrogance couldn’t stand it. Having just written my senior thesis on Virginia Woolf and Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, I felt confident in what I was about to say, “Sir, please allow me to show you where the authentic Derrida books are. You don’t need these simplified texts.”
The man looked up with a smile in his eyes. I thought he appreciated my generosity and excitement for hard to read theorists. I might have even shared with him a bit from my thesis, like “Bakhtin independently supported a deconstructionist strategy toward interpreting the infinite possibilities in discourse.”
Was he impressed by my wit? Perhaps. But he politely declined my invitation to help him with the real Derrida. I even stepped down from the register box, but he softly apologized and said he would be fine with his selection. I accepted his rejection and told him the offer always stands. He paid by credit card and I matched the squiggles of his two signatures. I bagged his book, wished him a good night, and the door swung closed.
My manager, meanwhile, was bent over the register drawer, fists full of dollar bills, puffing little gusts of wind from his mouth and shaking his head in small spastic starts. I realized he was laughing. I looked at him confusedly.
When he was finally able to speak, he yelped: “Do you know who that was?”
“No,” I replied. And he said, “That Was Derrida, the Jacques Derrida.”
I was stunned, humiliated, and delighted. I imagined I had made his night by singing his praises: a young woman passionate about the real thing. With laughter tears streaming down his cheeks, my manager asked me what I saw when I checked the signatures.
And I said quite plainly, embarrassment coating my voice, “I matched the circles, not the name.”
It has been over seven years since I rang up Derrida’s books on Derrida. The acting dream is all but buried and I now have a masters in English and comparative literature. I have studied enough Derrida to know that I know even less now than I did then. He was onto something when he bought himself for dummies. I will always wish I learned more about deconstruction from him, instead of from deconstructing his purchase.
Derrida urgently acknowledged his need to read and write. I started to write because I read Derrida and I continue to read because he wrote of infinite possibilities in every word, text, and situation. I am aware of the danger of oversimplifying, of reducing, of artificially defining that night at Shakespeare & Co. Downtown. But Derrida revealed to me the freshness of incompatibilities between the implicit and explicit circumstance of my life at the bookstore. I have since learned to embrace the conflict, the confusion, and the possibilities, and I have found humor in places where hierarchies are temporarily overturned and meaning appears where you least expect it.
Ms. Klein is a writer living in New York.