I don’t carry many books with me. That’s not a badge of honor but a fact after moving house 36 times in my adult life. And it’s not as if I don’t read.
Now that the cloud is our digital repository of memory both literary and real, I live in eager anticipation of never having bound paper in my hand ever again. It’s not that I am some philistine or bibliophobe. I just can’t take the baggage.
I still believe in libraries. In fact, the fisherman’s library concept allows me to “catch and release” books and that’s just about the level of commitment I am willing to make.
I don’t want to house them, shelve them, box them, or carry them in my bag. I don’t want to go to people’s apartments and look over their bookshelves to learn about what great collectors they are or what it says about the people I am visiting. The only exceptions I make are for autographs and books with stories or liner notes or generally anything in the margins. To me, those are specimens, not books.
Of course I am now reliant on my memory to think about the books I have read when I am not in front of a search engine. This reliance has become really hazardous since I learned how to relax and trained myself to think about nothing for a few minutes every day. Somehow this meditation technique has allowed books, like many experiences, to settle at the bottom of my brain’s memory cache. They will return when someone mentions them, but I don’t always have ready access to them.
Which is not to say I don’t live vicariously. Some people I know are founts of knowledge of authors, titles, and quotes. And I so really adore talking to them. Those kinds of people we used to call “encyclopedias” of knowledge (Will we continue to call them that?) help me to dive back into the sediment of my memory and rediscover some of the treasures to be found there. These are the Perlentaucher of my social sphere.
Oh how glad I am that none of them is truly like that character Papirnik by Doron Rabinovici, “kein Mann aus Fleisch und Blut” but made of paper who, to his credit, is leicht nachschlagbar, but dammit, he’s a book man made of paper. A mésalliance he has with a female chain smoker has the predictable result you would expect. But the love affair is smokin’ hot.
Books are wondrous creatures and books are also dead. I don’t mean that they will become extinct immediately. But they will at some point soon. They are dying. But stories contained within them live forever, which I find uncanny. Stories we recount, once published, are described in the present tense forever. I know that’s also true of the scroll and the chiseled stone tablet and the electronic tablet. An eternal present is just too difficult for my constantly changing, transforming, mutating, dying cells to hold on to for very long in a book form. Still, humans like me organize their lives around certain books: the weekly parsha from the Torah, parsed into weeks that are cyclically recited forever and ever in a yearly rotation in what seems to be an existential space totally asynchronous and outside of history. Sometimes, for example when life is unbearable, we return to that eternal textual present contained in books in order to illuminate our current circumstances. They carry us when we can no longer carry them. This seems to be the theory of how Jews in particular became the People of the Book. Or is it People of the Tablet? Or the Scroll? Or the Blog?