My family, basically unreligious and fairly modern in a low-key kind of way, has only one group bonding tradition that we refuse to forgo.
Each year around this time we make our annual pilgrimage to The Tattered Cover, often with all six of us adults cramming into my parents’ Subaru.
We first stop at the in- store coffee shop for provisions, and then we leave each other for a minimum of two hours, having come together just to separate.
There’s just something personal about looking for books that my family innately knows to be true – and shares – as one of our fundamental values; something intimate about scanning the titles and running our fingertips along their spines, trying to divine which one of them will speak to us at precisely this moment in our lives.
This physicality is something I’ve started to value all the more ever since those around me began to gleefully prophesize the inevitable annihilation of print at the hands of Internet and e-books.
“You can put them on your laptop!” my friends enthuse about downloadable texts of all types.
“Or your Palm – they’re great for airplanes.”
But I don’t want to read off my laptop or Palm – though I have and use both. For me, this would strip the experience of its soul, of the magical connection between reader and author through literary invention or journalistic clarity.
It’s a physical thing as much as an intellectual one. I want to feel the slight indentations that the press has made on each printed page or slide my palm across the glossy finish of a magazine.
I want the excitement of a new magazine in the mailbox and the thu-wop of a paper hitting my porch.
I want to listen to the slight creak as I open a new book and be able to close it reverently at the end of a particularly evocative passage so I can lean back and savor that particular moment in the text.
My e-book-toting friends who grew up on Nintendos don’t relate to my starry-eyed reminiscences of climbing a tree or dragging a refrigerator box out into my childhood yard so I could lie inside it … and read.
They don’t understand my nostalgia for the Weekly Reader program that allowed my bony fourth-grade finger to follow along as we read newspaper articles aloud in class.
At the end of each session I’d find my left forearm covered in ink because I’d been leaning forward on the page, captivated. My right index finger would be almost entirely black. As my classmates rushed out to whatever came next, I’d fold my paper carefully and surreptitiously smell the newsprint.
There is just something about reading that is intrinsically intimate.
Its supporters can extol technology’s virtues all they like, but I will still fight to defend my reading from its clutches. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as addicted to e-mail as anyone. I do all my shopping online, including that for rented videos and, only last week, pizza delivery. I became a loyal follower of PDAs in just three short weeks of using one. But these things I use for work, for convenience, for efficiency. And that isn’t why I read.
I read to escape, to linger over poetic passages or riveting scenes. I read to engage my imagination and put myself in new positions, whether socially, geographically or intellectually.
I just don’t believe that even my favorite book – the one that punched through my chest and grabbed my heart, holding it there as it beat anxiously until the closing pages – would be able to touch me if I read it off the cold, dead screen of a computer. There’s a distance there, a certain unrest that occurs as we slouch in front of our PCs, necks craning to see the monitor as we blink against drying eyes.
Print, we literally hold in our laps.
We invite it to connect with us through the stories it waits to tell. There is a trust established as we suspend our schedules and enter its pages without the impatience and prejudgment of our daily lives.
We make no such commitment to our computers because the information they bring us is so agreeably transitory. We want up-to-the-minute news, the most current trends and figures. We expect this from our Internet use: instant gratification, low investment and minimal obligation.
Print demands more of us. And delivers more in return.
The shelves in my library hold old friends that remind me of stages in my life as much as of the characters within their pages. As much as the events that they outline, I remember my discovery of each.
Moments of rereading passages to savor the prose, laying my hand against the page in appreciation or turning the pages so rapidly that the sound of their flipping became an audible manifestation of my excitement. Closest to my heart, though, are those written so brilliantly, so beautifully, that I felt compelled to pat their covers upon closing them as the last notes of their composition hung in the air, resonating into the subtle fading of a perfect finish. Sitting in my armchair, I would clasp these books to my chest in celebration of a story well told.
Try doing that with your PC.
