Books are everything to me, not Kindle, not e-books, but the physical manifestation itself, the weight in my hand, pages turning, the perfect order of its arrangement, its narrative going forward while the pages turn over and diminish.
Simplify.
Here is the book. Open the book. Here are the words. The words go inside. They make pictures. They summon emotions and memories and scenes we concoct we have never lived. This book connects to other books. Reading is the creation of constellations, not solar systems, and of paths that travel between galaxies and stars and planets, an ever expanding lacework of attachments and combinations of meaning.
Let me show you: Dillard describes stalking Tinker Creek in Virginia as I have on the Tully, the French Creek, the West Branch of the Susquehanna, on the Lamar, on the Yellowstone, along the strand on Marconi Beach and watching gray seals watch me; with Henry Beston, with Leopold and Muir. She describes her stealth, a commando’s stealth, like 100 movies I’ve watched, like Force Recon Marines staying disguised, quiet and watching; like naturalists waiting for the animal, the insect to show itself and be filmed; like monks, stillness personified, emptying their minds and becoming vessels to be filled; like that time on the mountain alone when snow peaks fell off into the distance and there was nothing else.
This is only a sliver of those connections. The mind does not rest because books are the perpetual motion machine, the eternal engine.
Books tap into the alternate consciousness. We are both in the book and in the world simultaneously. Imagine parallel lines traveling into the length of our lives since we began to read and occasional wires hot with images linking them. And if you read, for all of your life, others unlike you, or so it seems, appear, but you find they are like you in that they too can dream and laugh and feel for another not like themselves. Reading makes these circles, but the circles are not infallible predictors of humanity. Hitler’s library contained 16,000 books. Books do not make us. They shape us.
They are promises, disappointments, prone to decay, thrown away, rescued, treasured, ignored, delightful to look at, bringers of delight, so far and deep a part of me that I think my hands have grown crafted to their use.
Books have never saved my life, but they have fortified it and opened it up, forged armor I could strap on when I needed it and prompted me to yield and walk free of cover when it was wise and when doing so made me gentle.
I have 5 on my bedside table now, another 2 on the couch downstairs, 18 more arranged in my “next to” shelf upstairs and a handwritten list of over 50 I mean to purchase folded neatly into a small square in my money clip. Like genies summoned by wishes, more books appear. How lucky I have been.
