A RAMBLE

I read fewer books. I freely admit it. Those I do read are mostly on Kindle. Don’t get me wrong; I’m seldom more attentive as when a book engages me, and a physical book offers sensuous pleasure unavailable on my Kindle. But for someone who moves around, my Kindle can spell the difference between carry-on and check-in. And I can’t always procure physical books in a language I read. 

There are further advantages to e-readers: an infinity of reading material at hand or available in minutes, good steady lighting, custom features. 

I know people are divided about e-readers, but for me it’s a both/and, either/or proposition. 

But the biggest problem with e-readers is the same as with digital media generally. 

Pre-digital, when I visited people the books (and LP’s) on their shelves told me a lot about them. These were visible, shareable displays of predilection and taste, rich with semiotic cues. Like clothes, they helped make us readable to each other. A book can be loaned, borrowed, or even hurled across the room if you don’t like what’s in it. It is tangible, seeable. 

Today we sit across from each other, eyes downcast, jabbing at our devices. Alone together. I have no idea what the other reads or listens to, nor her me. We are opaque to each other, unreadable, in the illuminated caverns of our devices. Cloistered thus, we tap and swipe on tiny, mostly insignificant, options. We are what we click on, what we post. Instead of sharing a physical object in real time, I send the other a Spotify or YouTube link.

Reading less, scrolling more.

Our solitude has never been greater. 

We have disappeared into our devices. 

***

I now have digital access to previously unimaginable cultural abundance - books, music, films. You’d think I’d be gorging myself on this cornucopia. Instead I read, look, and listen less. 

***

I may read fewer books, but there are more words in my life than ever before. Packaging is saturated with copy, a blank surface seldom left inviolate. Online prompts and messages proliferate. On the highways, traffic instructions multiply. Tidal inundations of words, tsunamis of them. Little black typographical bugs crawling out of every orifice. 

Words can thrill. Words can kill. Or words can numb you to death. They have never been cheaper nor have there ever been more of them. What better argument for poetry, to restore words’ weight and meaning? 

Dr. Bronner’s text-slathered soap containers were once an amusing curiosity. Now, 9pt and 10pt type crawls over the face of nearly every product. Words are shoveled into our brain. Most are meant to persuade, many simply to comply with legal requirements. Here in Mexico, where obesity is a scourge, authorities loudly label food products: Exceso Grasa, Exceso Azucares, Exceso Sodio, Exceso Calorias. Yet the labels don’t seem to deter people from swilling Cokes just as before.

On US highways, rampant signage belabors the obvious, becomes its own road hazard. How did we ever survive a mile of driving without this surfeit of warnings and instructions? 

Words bubble and foam, spill over their borders. Language squandered. Sometimes I wonder how restful it might be to be illiterate. 

Still, words can matter, desperately. Love, death. Suicides, mass murderers. We rummage for the words they may have left behind, as if to explain…

***

Glimpses from pre-digital life:

Working in a bookstore that stocks books and some magazines. No gift cards, coffee mugs, coffee. 

Sitting on the floor listening to a new album reading the copious, informed LP liner notes, forging a symbiosis between words and music that would last a lifetime.

Looking around her room, I see the Jacqueline Susann paperbacks and Herb Alpert records that tell me no, this romance isn’t going anywhere.

Browsing magazines and journals at a news stand, now as obsolete as pay phones.

Thumbing card files in a busy, inhabited library. 

Hearing a daily newspaper landing on my doorstep.

***

I have a friend who haunts old bookstores in Mexico City and Los Angeles. He doesn’t consider himself a collector, one who buys books for their own sake. His literary sleuthing, he says, is simply so that when he wants to look up something in his home he will have at hand books that allow it. He rummages pleasurably among the detritus of an abandoned world. The book as object, container, thing.

***

Whither books? For that matter, whither words? I heard, whether it’s true or not, that Ikea no longer sells bookshelves because there’s simply not enough demand for them. Regardless, the future of physical books is precarious, murky. 

The future of fiction, however, is assured, because fictions, like dreams, are necessary activities of consciousness. Like dreams, stories fuse reality and imagination, weave narrative as spiders weave webs. 

Yes, words can deceive but they can also proof us against deceit. To reprise Marguerite Yourcenar’s comment: “True writers are necessary: they express what others feel without being able to give it form, and that is why all tyrannies muzzle them.” 

As long as writers can be jailed, tortured or murdered for them, words will continue to matter.