With the advent of the Kindle we might not get to stuff our noses vigorously into the binding of a book, inhale deeply and sense that gentle madness born of opuscule intoxication, but at least we can brag about the library in our pockets. Is there meaning lost when we move from the printed page to the glowing screen? Somebody thinks so.
I found myself in a Borders yesterday casting longing glances toward leather-bound journals ripe with blank pages. I use MacJournal to chronicle my days, but there are no smudge marks, coffee spills, or crossed-out words to mark the passing of time on my Powerbook G4. From another world I have in my possession over four decades worth of journaling recorded by one of my ancestors dating from the late 1890s to the mid 1940s. These small volumes each contain five years worth of handwritten entries. I am in the process of transcribing the diaries into the digital age and thereby gaining all the benefits of storage and search, but opening a Word document isn't following carefully written lines jotted down hours after a child is born or days before a pilgrimage ends. My kids may want to read my journal some day when they wonder how I wiled away the time, but first they will have to find compatible software (good luck with that) and then they will have to click through tedious lists of daily entries. There will be no turning of pages, no sense they are holding a life in their hands, no personal part of myself left on a page, save for the wallpaper chosen as a backdrop to entries. Oh they can print it all out, but I will not be on the neat ream of paper gliding through the printer. There will be no artifact.
I suppose no one would debate that handwritten journals are precious possessions, but what about the rest of the books in a library? What about the act of holding and reading the printed word? Of turning pages with pencil in hand and scribbling and circling and underlining and writing here and there and everywhere? Of moving from cover to title to contents to text to index to text to footnotes to text in seamless succession? Of filling our desktops full of open tomes and listening to a chorus of voices at once? Of feeding on folios with Jeremiah or filling our bellies with scrolls sweet as honey like Ezekiel? Of consuming codexes?
Something is lost in the Kindling fires.
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