The sad truth is that Wordsworth was never a great bookstore. It was a good bookstore, on a prominent corner, and it committed the appealing heresy of discounting what was once otherwise an obdurately retail commodity. It was a bastion of an age in which it took only 10% more commitment to be good, and in which even a merely-good bookstore was a simple greatness, and it died yesterday with its dying era. A block away, a thinly-disguised Barnes & Noble beckons expansively, and it's harder to sustain a polemic against corporatism when independence had nowhere to sit down, a deteriorating selection, no coffee, and basement premises that never quite smelled right. We walk willingly into our comfortable self-corruption, half the time, because the moral alternatives let us down.  

The night Wordsworth dies, the Brattle is playing Goodbye Dragon Inn. I say goodbye to an icon of books and their places, and walk across the street to watch a movie about the death of an icon of movies and their places. As ghosts haunt the dark corridors of Tsai Ming-Liang's forsaken movie house, somebody keeps walking through the shadowed wings of this one. I am a ghost of places just by sitting here, saying goodbye to a place I am now too late to see.  

And yet, the books outlive the bookstores, and the movies outlive the theaters. We are ghosts, but alive. We take the places into ourselves, and so, as best we can, become them.