The More Things Change…

Sezane tank
Zara jeans (similar)
J. Crew sandals (similar)
Sezane bag
RayBan sunglasses
Linjer rings (c/o) (similar)
Mejuri earrings (similar)
Location: Stoa tou Bibliou – Athens, Greece

…the more they stay the same. Or so the saying goes. There’s another one about how change is the only constant, and probably dozens of others I could make reference to if I wanted to belabour my point. Change is part of life. But the last few years brought it into much sharper focus, as the pace at which things, big things, life-altering things, changed, accelerated at an alarming rate. Most of us would like a bit of constancy now, just so we can pause to take it all in and process how we feel about it.

One of the most interesting things about going back to Athens this fall was that it allowed us to start to process our feelings, in some ways. Athens was our last big pre-pandemic travel adventure. We visited the place where we took these photos, Stoa tou Bibliou, or the Gallery of the Book, on our last day in the Greek capital in 2019. A stoa is a curio, unique to Athens as far as I know. It’s an interior courtyard between buildings that is accessible from the street but that you’d be unlikely to find unless you knew it was there. (There are a number of them in the city, all unique. This one is my favourite, which I’m sure surprises no one.)

Stoa tou Bibliou is beautiful. It’s a quiet, elegant haven in the middle of the city, which you can usually enjoy in relative solitude.

It’s because I love the place that I almost didn’t want to go back again this year. We nearly skipped it. Although I felt reassured returning to Athens to find the city nearly unaltered or, at least, unchanged at its core, after three years away, I still worried about facing the loss of places I loved to the inevitable change that comes with time and absence. What if Stoa tou Bibliou was different? And what if that difference meant it had lost some of the charms – the doorways to nowhere, the rainwater patina – that made me love it so much when I first stumbled upon it?

There are some questions to which there are no answers. There are other questions whose answers will not satisfy us, even if we get them. But questions about possible changes at Stoa tou Bibliou were not those kinds of questions. I needed to know. And the only way to find out was to see the place again. In person. So we went.

…it has changed, of course. The little cafe, frequented mostly by the few workers from surrounding buildings and wandering cats, is closed now. That it stayed open at all, even before two years of shutdowns, always seemed a bit improbable (and, thus, a bit magical.) I could accept the closure as inevitable under almost any circumstances without too much sadness. The rest of the place, remarkably, was just as I remembered it. Unmarked by the passage of time, as if its near-secret location has shielded, or at least sheltered it, from experiencing the acceleration of change in the rest of the city, and the world.

“Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke

The thing about change is that really, it’s mostly positive. Not everything changes for the better, but generally, change means growth and evolution, even if it comes with discomfort and, occasionally, regret. It’s just been – a lot, the past couple of years. And when we experience big changes, especially a lot of them, all at once, we often seek comfort in the familiar to ease the adjustment. I found a little bit of the familiarity that I’ve craved at Stoa tou Bibliou. It gave me space to breathe for a bit and take stock of how different I am now than I was the last time I was there; of how good all of the change I’ve gone through has actually been, even if it’s also been hard.

That familiarity was a reminder. No matter how much life changes – and it does, it will – there will always be places we can come back to when we need them. Places that feel the same.

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