Bookaholic

Having spent my life (not that much more to spend) on books, I now feel called to re-answer the question What is a book? My best answer before had been “a well-formed idea,” one that might take a whole book to express.

Some books, in the fiction realm, take you to places that the real world can’t — violence, betrayal, heroism, derring-do, confrontations, escapes. Textbooks lead you into expertise, at least partway. Topical books get you thinking, or enraged, or informed, or show you how to… and each in its own way allows you to grow or expand your horizons.

The ideal book — is there such a thing? — engages you, well, let me say that an ideal book engages me. Like a conversation where I end up doing a lot of listening, sometimes with a little outburst of But what if? before the book gently answers in the following pages.

And now we enter a pageless era, or rather, like McLuhan taught us years before, we see the new technology in the frame of the old, as, for example the “horseless carriage” which became the automobile (also an inapt description: auto/self mobile/moving). So, not the “pageless book,” then what should we call it? I’ve seen “vook” or “voox” for video books, not to my liking.

What is the essence of a book? Not the paper and the ink printed on it. If you think about reading, it’s really quite an unusual skill. We’ve adapted our keen hunting eyes to focus word-by-word and line-by-line while simultaneously shutting out almost all other sensory input. It’s like being in a trance; we hear the silent words on the page as they pull us along a story line. The words are crafted to immerse us in an environment that is not the one we’re actually sitting in, filled with characters who are not present but whose actions we anticipate with anxiousness. Experiments have been done with subjects watching people eating, and they feel full or overfull from that vicarous experience. Likewise, we are present in the fictive imagination, which resembles a world we might inhabit (usually). We care about the heroes and despise the villains, we feel the anguish or lust or ambition of the protagonist. Is it history or fantasy, or does it matter?

My beat has been the classics, or, rather, the enduring documents on which our society is built. I won’t say they are timeless, as that is a large claim; each had its initial impact in a cultural crisis which seems resolved today, perhaps because they did change the course of history.

When I went into the study of literature, I assumed that the great writers were representative of their times. In fact, that is wrong. Each one stood out against the common current of their times, an oddball, a freak, an outrageous figure sometimes reviled. They weren’t the norm, they were the exception. Today we accept the common wisdom that the French Impressionists remade stuffy old paintings into a living vibrant art. Ha! Only in hindsight blinded by the blur of rewritten history.

Back to books. What is communicated from one (often dead) person by means of words alone that is so important that we can’t let go of it? This person saw more deeply, or felt more deeply, or lived more honestly that we could have imagined, and was able to share that insight, that complex of emotion, that counterintuitive truth.

It has been a puzzle to me why we have such big brains. We live in a society where intelligence is hardly required to drive a car or get a job or get married and raise a family. One could go through life following orders or accepting what everybody else thinks, and be just fine. So what happens to all that extra horsepower in our skulls? We build industries out of games, movies, publishing, sports, entertainment that is not “productive” in and of itself, that is, there is no end result, no product, no service to make things better, except for personal satisfaction.

The phrase “fictive imagination” caught my attention this year. I’ve been cogitating about it, and I find that it may be the way to describe what we do with our extra brain cells (besides gossip; three-quarters of human face-to-face communication, I’ve read, is gossip).

This human skill of pretending takes some practice, and a bit of growing up so you no longer look behind the TV set to see what happens to those little people when the set is turned off. We get so good at it that we can see things that aren’t there just by reading about them. Even when we know that those characters and scenes don’t exist! That’s what the fictive imagination can do. We learn to think beyond our current reality, and sometimes use that to create a new reality, as entrepreneurs do, or when you change jobs, or travel across country with scarcely a thought.

So, I haven’t settled on the “ideal book,” but I think there’s a clue in there worth contemplating. Ebooks, OK, it’s easy enough to put text in anything. Kindle and iPad bring some possibilities to the table. What is a book? still obsesses me. Will I recognize it when it comes differently? Will readers?