Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
-Henry Ward Beecher
I feel like Mother Hubbard and the cupboard is bare. My books are all packed away; about 70 boxes have gone to storage, another dozen are sealed up and marked with purple duct tape, part of our shipment to Malaysia. They are not all MY books, of course, but I probably know them best, and surely love them most.
I have been surprised at how many times in the last week something has triggered a thought and I have headed for an empty bookshelf - the particular one where the poetry book I want always stands, only to realize it is not there. A lot of the poetry I could find on the web, of course, but it's just not the same. First, I would have to stand in line behind three teenagers for computer time, and then, even when I found the poem I couldn't take it up to bed with a cup of coffee and read it as I snuggle under the aptly named comforter. I couldn't flip a few pages to that other poem I love, and close the book when my eyelids begin to close of their own accord.
I miss knowing where I can find almost any volume - I, who cannot find a pen or a hairbrush when I need one - confident that the passage I want to reread will be easy to find because the pages have been deliberately dog-eared. I miss sorting through the stack of books on my bedside table, deciding which of the five books I am currently reading will fit my mood tonight. I miss trying to figure out where I left off because I fell asleep before I finshed the chapter last time.
And I wonder if electronic media will indeed replace books, if the convenience of holding an entire library of books in the palm of your hand will take the place of the old paper and cardboard objects people have been clutching for the last 400 years or so. I wonder if the book as a physical object will go the way of the phonograph and whether people will be satisfied with disembodied ideas. In some ways that is an appealing idea; I mean, the important thing, the "real" thing about a book is the ideas it creates in one's mind, not the heft of the recycled wood product on which it is printed. But I, at least, feel wedded to the physical object as well.
I remember carefully placing the frightening books I read as a child (and even a teenager, I confess) outside my bedroom door at night and closing the door shut against the fearful object. There were some books I could not have in the room after the lights went out! I have several Bibles from different periods in my life, and sometimes I need a particular one to read when I am looking for comfort. Of course I know that the real comfort comes from the words of God recorded there, not the book itself as some sort of talisman or charm. . . but still, I have so much history with the book, with the page, with tearstains that wrinkle the paper in certain places. . . My husband has shared our bed with books over the years, ones I fall asleep reading and drop somewhere in the blankets. I have grown accustomed to the thunk of a book falling off the bed in the middle of the night when someone stretches in their sleep, and I like the sound.
So, this separation from my comfort objects may be just the thing I need to wean me from their physical presence; I may find the web is faster and easier to search, that anything I really need can be downloaded and carried effortlessly in my purse, that it's freeing not to have to worry about the book I left out on the blanket in the yard under my favorite tree when the rain starts. But I doubt it.
2 comments:
As someone who spends his days helping others learn new ways of using computers, one of those ways being to keep an electronic library, I can be counted on to speak to the benefits of such. My own computer boasts well over 700 books of various sorts on it from poetry to Bibles to technical texts. I count among the authors in my e-library (to further abuse that poor little letter that seems to prepend everything these days) Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Douglas Adams, Bill Bryson, Mark Twain, Daniel Dafoe, Henrik Ibsen, G.K. Chesterton, etc., etc., etc. All with me at all times, their thoughts and favorite passages just a few clicks away.
And I do think it is a wonderful thing to be able to have such a library so readily available. I honestly believe the future is heading that way.
And yet...
When I perform my annual ritual of reading through The Lord of the Rings, I always do so on paper. I've destroyed at least three paperback sets so far in the last 32 years (reading my hardback copy sparingly to save it from such a fate) and will go through many more in the years to come if God allows. I would never read it on a computer screen.
When I curl up in a comfy chair with a cup of coffee on a wild night it is with paper, not silicon, that I choose to share my evening. I spend far more extending my physical library that I ever would my virtual one, hence the need to borrow those 4 bookshelves. (Of course this statement is a bit disingenuous as most of my electronic books I get for free--yet another plus for e-books.)
But am I, and perhaps you, an anachronism? Will books go the way of the horse and carriage, used only by those who eschew modernity and those who yearn nostalgically for the "good old days"? I fear so.
Just as the intimacy of a farmer and his horse lost out to the reliability and productivity of the tractor, there are just too many practical arguments to be made for the switch to electronic books. (If all of your books were on your computer, you wouldn't have those 70+ boxes in storage, nor would you be without these old friends.)
But the loss, should it happen, will be both very, very real and far too little recognized. The first generation that grows up with almost all e-books will not know anything else, so how can they miss all the good things that they never had? How many children who have never done it miss playing kick the can until the sun is so far down you can't even see your own feet, let alone the can you have to leap? Instead, they know “Lost” and XBox games and don't have any sense of loss.
You and I and our generation know the intimacy of a book and some of us will miss it. Indeed I miss it already, even though it is not yet gone.
Ok. I'll comment on this, too. In the past three years, I have been reading through a list of classic and "great books" (voted on by a majority, I suppose). Right now I'm almost done with Main Street by Lewis, and I have a copy of Vanity Fair on hold at the library. I'm "reading" these books on cassette in the car as I commute to and from work. I don't think I can get as poetic about the feel and smell of the plastic cassettes, or about falling asleep listening to "Cry the Beloved Country." But it has made the trip from home to work and back so much more enjoyable, and occasionally other drivers may have wondered why I was laughing out loud, talking to the cassette player, or wiping a tear from my eyes.
I usually am concurrently reading another book to myself and one to my son, so I have not lost contact with the "book" feel. The copy of Molière's plays that I have from the library right now is old, falling apart, and covered with plastic, but it does have that old familiar musty, moldy smell. Ah, wonderful!
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