A few moments ago, I found myself trying to read from a book with one hand and type with the other. This posture is non-optimal for either activity.
Annoyed, I acquiesced to the book's demands. And I suddenly felt a wave of humility and contrition sweep over me. The book did not grin in triumph, it did not gloat or preen; instead, it nestled gratefully into my hands, smiled up at me and said, 'Thank you!'
Way back in 1984, I wrote a column for a newspaper that quoted sociologist Tony Campolo, who was arguing vociferously against the advent of technology in storytelling. His ire was leveled in particular against Star Wars, which was still fresh, and within which the rapidity of sensory assault had (at that time) set a new world record, with its relentless blasts of sounds and images and musical bombast. Campolo's argument: whatever happened to books? Whatever happened to the simplicity of opening a book and turning on the mind?
Well, I don't need to be sold; I possess almost as many books as I have body hairs - but the brief, non-textual exchange I had with this particular book in this particular moment offered up a new thought.
A book, by design, demands all of me.
I need both hands to hold it. Oh, I can hold a book in one hand, size and weight allowing, but I still need my other hand to turn the page. I need both station and calm to engage with it, for the required posture demands full attention; I need tranquility to fully receive it, for it makes uncompromising calls on my eyes, mind, and memory.
Of course, we live in a world that isn't all books and summer blockbusters - in between we find all manner of reading material, enmeshed in varying tangles of technology. I read from screens all day long, and they do not make the intimate demands of the book; I can nudge them along with a tap on a screen or a tease of a mouse. My attention can be - indeed, most often must be - fragmented at best, for any screen I admit will be an arena of playground antics, competing for my eyes.
Then there are the non-digital remnants of my youth - newspapers and magazines, book-like in structure but more akin to digital screens in substance. Here, too, there is much noise, all too little intimacy, and no embrace is called for.
It's the embrace, I think, that is finally the point.
A book calls out to the reader’s senses. The pages of a book greet the reader’s fingertips like nothing else that fingers ever touch, warm and even and slightly grainy. It has a certain smell that only books – especially new ones! - have. We’ve all been in libraries; is there any other building that smells like one?
And that unique scent changes over time; I remember the attic of my mother’s father’s home, where many bookcases stuffed with ancient paperbacks lived, and how different it smelled than any other room. That scent always reminds me of him, a kind and quiet man of much unspoken thought and private wisdom, and how he would bring me a book with every visit, or have a new one waiting when our family would visit him, and how that ritual made me who I am today.
All of these features of a book coalesce into a demand for my consummate attention, and that attention includes not just my mind but my full touch and sensory engagement. The book will settle for nothing less than a tactile relationship - like the child who extends her arms, wishing to be picked up, or the lover who wants to be held. When I enter into congress with a book, our exchange admits no other party; interruption is unwelcome, and even music in the background must be unobtrusive. It is our private occasion, and no one else's.
I didn't think it was possible for me to love books more; today, once again, I learned a little something.
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