Sixth Session: Books

Some several centuries ago a fellow named Gutenberg developed a printing press, a contraption of iron and movable type and ink derived from vegetable dyes that pounded the ink onto the type and typed exactly onto flattened sheets of processed wood fiber, called paper. Moving the type rearranged the letters and the new arrangements were pounded through the ink onto still more paper. Many hundreds and in some cases thousands of these pages were bound together and held between two thick leather covers. This was known as a book.

Variously the construction is different now but the spirit remains the same. The humans have finally begun to move away from the classic physical form and have begun storing this information electronically. Books can be downloaded from the very self-same internet you are uploading this signal from.

I do not deny that it is strange. Our literacy developed orally which meant whatever was important was remembered and whatever was drivel slipped away to the obscurity of the ages. Granted, we are rather long-lived and so it would take time before our schlock artists and their progeny went the way of all tripe. And it is not unreasonable to argue that, apart from the savage destruction of the trees, this insures that, so long as they are preserved, bad ideas linger long after their makers have been expunged. In fact there are even human examples from antiquity who professed that binding words into concrete form was a misguided endeavor. Socrates, I believe he was called.

We, who developed language, communication, engineering, and history entirely within ourselves--only constructing hieroglyphics when it became necessary to broach intergalactic commerce--would assuredly consider ourselves above the blatant stagnation of this "written word". Even now my inflection, my pauses, my empathy and my rhetoric, my search for the proper term, its ephemeral flavor, is lost when converted to defined boundaries of syntax and periods, commas, etc. And believe me, what constitutes a "book" down here, two covers filled with pages, is often more substantial than what it means to say.

But they remind me of my wife.

Books have a smell about them. New ones, to be sure, smell new, but older books, things left and leaned on, stained, had things grown inside them, deployed for purposes as strange as prayer or the generation of delight, offer voluminous aroma. And it is entirely different to read a page by oneself than it is to be told of that page. Both have their places, to be sure.

Yet one holds a book. I have read over 1,000 since my sentence began dating from centuries ago to what has just arrived in the market. Some are awful, trite collections of what these creatures consider homilies. Others are playful diversions. Still others, others transform a stillness in the air to a ready, flexing wing. And there is something beyond explanation in that which I do not have the courage to transmit.

I understand well the laws of our sphere and that my wife is no longer legally recognized as such. Be that as it may I do begin to understand the method to the madness that is this public transmission. Not having to request of you my wife's attention is a welcome remnant of dignity.