On Books (Finished and Unfinished)

I know very little about the invention of the printing press or how it works, but that won’t stop from extolling it as one of the greatest machines ever created. The power to mass produce the printed word has been a never-ending gift to human kind.

I love books. I love their timelessness. Books persist as a medium of communication in the face of perpetually rapid technological achievement. Last month, Steve Jobs pronounced the death of reading. I’m a big fan of Apple. I use my MacBook a lot and love my new iPod, but Jobs couldn’t be more wrong about reading. Here’s a survey stating that 27% of Americans read more than 15 books a year. With the U.S. population over 300 million that number means that at least 1.2 billion books are read by a quarter of the world’s biggest consumer market. If the rest of nation reads an average of one book a year that ups the number of books read in American in a single year to 1.5 billion. That number dwarves the 3.7 million iPhones sold in 2007. Long story short, the publishing industry has nothing to worry about.

I love the physicality of books. I love the way the paper feels in my hands. I love the smell of the ink. I love the way books look on my shelves. The closest one can measure a person by possessions is by browsing his or her home library.

As someone who has professed a love of movies over all things, rare is it that I find a movie adaptation better than its source. I was so floored by Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men that I felt underwhelmed after seeing the movie adaptation made by two of my favorite filmmakers. The pictures in my own head born out of great writing feel more vivid than anything on a screen. What a great feeling is to be so enrapt with a book that you can’t physically let go.

Beloved books feel like home. White Noise, The End of the Affair, Mother Night, A Scanner Darkly, Survivor, The Left Hand of Darkness, Tumble Home. I can live in these books.

I write about books because I’m currently experiencing a new phenomenon with a great book. That book is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. I started reading the book two years ago and I have yet to finish it. Usually when I take forever to read a single book it’s because I generally dislike it. I read Moby Dick over the course of a year and hated every page of it. However, I love The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It might be one of the best books I’ve ever read. I’ll pick it up, get engrossed in it and then put it down for months. I’ll pick it up again later and repeat the cycle, not missing a beat. The book is long compared to most modern novels, but not excessively so. It’s a breeze to read, fascinating and an endlessly beautiful work of art. I’m just taking forever to finish it. I’m almost done. It will be a bittersweet finish. I’ll feel glad to finally have finished it, but I’ll miss living inside the book.

Has this ever happened to anybody? Has anybody else out there had problems finishing a book they loved? How did your story end?

And what comes after?

Does anyone wonder what will come after this civilization?

Much like the Roman Empire and the Greek Empire that preceded it one day the Western Civilization will come to a crashing end. And then what?

What's going to happen to the cities?

What's going to happen to all of the infrastructure we've put in place?

How long will it take for the human population to re-associate into collections of peoples?

What will be left of this place in 1000 years?

I'm just curious.

Intro

So: blogging. Again. This is the first time I've done this in a long time, my last blog died after fading away. I got busy and with few people reading what I wrote it didn't make sense to spend so much time on it.

But I love writing. Pen to paper, words on the screen: communication that transcends both time and space - all with simple arbitrary lines in the form of characters and words.

When I was in 7th grade I went to an art museum in Ann Arbor Michigan with my art class and perhaps one of the best teachers I had ever had. She was our Art teacher, (Greek my nationality and we called her Katie since her last name was darn near unpronounceable) and was a professor at the University. There she took us into the exhibits and showed us this small chard of pottery with writing on it. Most of us didn't care, it was broken and old - not majestic like some of the art on display, the beautiful marble sculptures or the paintings. She said it dated from the 2nd or so century A.D. and - as she explained - since paper wasn't invented yet - or at least very rare and expensive, people would use broken pieces of pottery or what not to write whatever they needed to much like what we use scrap paper for now.

The writing on the chard was that of a shopping list. Katie then read off what it said.

I then had an epiphany.  While standing there I realized for the first time how powerful writing was. How one can take information and encode it in some physical medium - engrave the very thoughts into a piece of material where it then will remain for centuries independent of the writer who has long since died. Writing gives a sense of immortality.

Kind of.

The real problem standing in our way of communication immortality is that of formats. If you doubt this, talk to my friend who has all of his college documents on zip drives. How do I know that the format (or the medium in which I'm storing the data) will be accessible in 50 years? How can I be guaranteed that in 100 years I will be able to read this hard drive (assuming it hasn't gone bad in the meantime) and read the data? In photography we're facing the same problem. 

The only solution I have found thus far is the same solution the ancient Egyptians found: paper.

Until electronics can be as fail safe as paper we're going to be running into this problem. Paper still is permanent.

In 50 years all of the stuff I have posted to flickr and other places most likely won't be here. In 500 years when our civilization is being excavated by archeologists all of my digital accomplishments will be lost forever.

But that which I have committed to paper will be able to be read.

after all, the broken piece of pottery still speaks.