Taught to read at a very young age, raised in a house with few books but encouraged to haunt libraries, entranced by the images I could make in my head based on strings of words I heard or read, I took to books as birds take to the air – the element that set me partially free of adult controls and made me imaginatively migratory. I worry that my experience is dying.
Books demand long periods of attention while online reading, even of longer, denser pieces, and especially on a phone, is a series of scrolling fragments – only so much may appear on a screen at a time, punctuated by advertisements and other opportunities to click into attachments within the article. Add in texts and notifications and the invisible world presses in and in, refusing to suspend its insistence that it be given preference. A person’s imaginative strength depends upon a release from the buzz of the real (and the trivial) long enough to be able to establish its own wild territory. The nature of on-line presentations of prose encourages multiple disturbances within the confines of a lengthy focus. Add in the eye strain that accompanies time spent on any device and one finds that on-line reading is designed to break concentration and to impede depth of thought. It is the anti-matter to the actual matter of books. It is the destroyer of worlds.
I’m thinking of carefully prying floorboards loose and secreting books I love wrapped in wax paper and steel wool and aluminum foil, and many years from now when another owner begins refinishing and rehabbing, he or she will come across packages, a note from me in each, of Hope Against Hope or Red Calvary or Beloved or Pax and be momentarily dazed by the treasures they’ve found. Maybe reading books then will still command the measure of wonder it deserves.
