Books

The Bookshelf as Memory Theater

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Nathan Schneider’s “In Defense of the Memory Theater” begins thus:

What concerns me about the literary apocalypse that everybody now expects—the at least partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives—is not chiefly the books themselves, but the bookshelf. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people assemble over the course of our lives, as well as for their grander, public step-siblings. I fear for our memory theaters.

And concludes as follows:

As the business of reading technology continues along its trajectory, whether apocalyptic or utopian or both, perhaps those of us who continue to fancy ourselves concerned readers—however much we give in to the new and shiny—might turn our attention anew to what one might call “inner work.” In the part of ourselves which is not technological, we could rediscover the tautology that what makes knowledge so precious is its precariousness, not the surety of our control over it. We’ll need to cultivate the arts of memory and forgetting alluded to in these lines by William Blake, which came to me in a letter from a friend, a librarian who, for years now, has been slowly dying in a monastery:

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

Even among these wonders now available to us and still to come, all having remains no less a preparation for loss.

Ready? Because that’s what is at stake.

Read everything in between at Open Letters Monthly.

In case you don’t, here is at least one more dose:

Modern life, if we can still call it that, occurs as a sequence of gleeful apocalypses. One world constantly gives way to another. If it doesn’t, “consumers”—as people now call themselves—get anxious. We’re familiar with the drill: new audio/video formats arrive every decade; a new “generation” of cell phone every couple years; and, on a rolling basis, there’s the expectation that several totally unexpected paradigm shifts are in the works—the internet, global climate change, a new fundamental particle, and that sort of thing.

Shared Sensibilities

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Rochelle Gurstein captures in lovely prose a handful of thoughts I have attempted, with less eloquent results, to express in recent days.  “The Perils of Progress”, a brief essay appearing in The New Republic, opens with a story about “a lecture by an exquisitely sensitive, painfully alert poet friend of ours about how we live today” which elicits tired labels contemptuously applied.  As Gurstein puts it:

These days, even a few well-considered, measured reservations about digital gadgetry apparently cannot be tolerated, and our poet friend was informed by forward-looking members of the audience that she was fearful of change, nostalgic, in short, reactionary with all its nasty political connotations.

And this presumably from a learned and sophisticated audience.

Gurstein goes on to challenge the same NY Times editorial by Steven Pinker which drew some of my own comments a few days ago.  She observes that in …

… disputes about the consequences of innovation, those on the side of progress habitually see only gains. They have no awareness that there are also losses—equally as real as the gains (even if the gain is as paltry as “keeping us smart”)—and that no form of bookkeeping can ever reconcile the two.

Gurstein concludes with some poignant reflections on the materiality of the book and the difference it makes to the experience of reading and the reader’s relationship to the author.  The essay truly is worth a few minutes of your time to read.  Also reading the few comments posted in response to Gurstein’s essay tends to reinforce her concerns.

At one point in the essay Gurstein spoke of Pinker’s “stacking the deck against” her sensibility.  That word, sensibility, struck me.  This is I think near to the heart of matter.  What Gurstein and others like her attempt to defend and preserve is not merely a point of view or a particular truth.  It is more subjective than that, but is not merely preference.  It is not at all like a preference, which, I suspect, is precisely what those who do not understand it will try to label it.  It is, well, a sensibility — a certain disposition or way of being in the world.  It is an openness and a sensitivity to certain kinds of experience and to certain dimensions of reality.  Because of this it resists description and facile reduction to the terms of a cost/benefit analysis.  Consequently, it can be difficult to convincingly defend a sensibility to those who know nothing of it.  Maybe it is best described as a “seeing the world as” or, perhaps better still, a “feeling the world as.”  A sensibility is a posture toward life, a way of inhabiting the world.

What all of this groping for words may have at its center is the experiential quality of a sensibility, and experience is, after all, incommunicable.   Unless, that is, two people share the sensibility and then words may even seem superfluous.  In this sense, those who share a sensibility, share the world.  Those who lack or fail to appreciate the sensibility Gurnstein articulates know only to shake their heads in condescending bemusement.  What those, like Gurnstein and her poet friend, who grieve the passing of a culture that nurtured their sensibility fear may be the onset of a long loneliness.

Dread of the Unread

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 5 Comments

Several years ago I came across a well-known line from Erasmus: “When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”  Apparently this is a variant, the line from one of Erasmus’ letters dated 1500 runs thus:  “I have turned my entire attention to Greek.  The first thing I shall do, as soon as money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.”  Although the variant is more pithy, the sentiment seems to me largely the same in either case. I clipped the quote and stuck it in my wallet.  It would serve as a gentle reminder of where the money went.  Book shops perpetually tempt, and used book stores in particular tempt beyond my power to resist.

All that is fine and well.  It may be a vice, but it is a splendid vice.  However, there is a dark side to the book shop; entering therein incites a certain anxiety and sadness.  A sign should hang over every book shop declaring, “Abandon all hope, all ye who enter in … you cannot read it all.”  The sentiment is ancient.  Ecclesiastes warned, “of making many books there is no end” … to say nothing of reading them.  I’ve thought in the past that I had overcome this anxiety, this psychological burden of the unread.  In “The Pleasures of Reading,” Joseph Epstein’s writes,

Gertrude Stein said that the happiest moment of her life was that moment in which she realized that she wouldn’t be able to read all the books in the world.  I suppose what made it happy for her was that it took off a fair amount of pressure.

And so I thought, upon reading that testimonial, that I too had now suddenly come to terms with the awful realization.  But no, it was a false dawn.  While the angst fades, it still abides and from time to time reasserts itself with a certain gleeful vengeance.  Epstein went on to say,

I have finally come to the realization that I shan’t be able to read even all the good books in the world, and, far from making me happy, it leaves me, a naturally acquisitive fellow, a little sad.

I rather sympathize.

With all of that in mind, consider Will Self’s column in the New Statesman that came to my attention via Alan Jacobs this morning.  Here’s a sampling:

Back then, I laboured under the healthy delusion that, although I could not be as well read as Coleridge (who was said to be the last man to have read everything), I might yet read all that truly mattered.

Now, just as the possibility of joyous congress among the stacks retreats on hushed puppies, so the idea of all those unread books has become a screaming torment. Even the most innocuous of local libraries feels to me like Borges’s library of Babel, with its infinite number of texts ….

If the consciousness of unread books was bad enough, what about the consciousness of unread web pages?

It all puts me in mind of the Cha’an meditation illness: an incontinent recall of Buddhist texts that is the symptom of a Zen pupil’s overstrained psyche, and which can only be rectified by his master hitting him on the head with a stick. Otherwise, the texts proliferate across his visual field, while the meaning of every word is instantly grasped by him. At first, there are just texts the pupil knows, but soon enough these are joined by others he has only heard of – yet these, too, are comprehended in their entirety.

There is worse to come, as flying from all angles wing still more texts that the pupil is compelled to include in his screaming wits – texts he has never heard of at all, texts he didn’t know could exist, texts written by alien civilisations, texts doodled on the Etch a Sketch of God by archangels peaking on acid! No stick is big enough to beat this pupil – Humanity. So the maddening and delusory library expands, while the real and useful one is shut down.


Book v. Computer

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

The results are in (at least tentatively).

From the Freakonomics folks at the NY Times:

More evidence that technology doesn’t always equal higher test scores: a new working paper by Jacob L. Vigdor and Helen F. Ladd examines the effects of home computer and internet access on test scores.  Consistent with the research of Ofer Malamud and Christian Pop-Eleches, Vigdor and Ladd found that “the introduction of home computer technology is associated with modest but statistically significant and persistent negative impacts on student math and reading test scores.”

Meanwhile from a study reported on by The Chronicle of Higher Education:

What’s surprising … is just how strong the correlation is between a child’s academic achievement and the number of books his or her parents own. It’s even more important than whether the parents went to college or hold white-collar jobs. Books matter. A lot.  The study was conducted over 20 years, in 27 countries, and surveyed more than 70,000 people. Researchers found that children who grew up in a home with more than 500 books spent 3 years longer in school than children whose parents had only a few books. Also, a child whose parents have lots of books is nearly 20-percent more likely to finish college. For comparison purposes, the children of educated parents (defined as people with at least 15 years of schooling) were 16-percent more likely than the children of less-educated parents to get their college degrees. Formal education matters, but not as much as books.

This may of course assume that one doesn’t necessarily believe that quantity trumps quality.  For more on both studies visit Rough Type.