by Rishidev Chaudhuri
Thankfully, History is helping. I liked tapes and CDs, but I don’t miss them and I’m relieved that they’ve vanished into pure Spirit (or whatever their ultimate end is). It was always hard to tell what music I owned and hard to find it and hard to decide what to take where, and I constantly found CDs in strange places and they have hard edges. I hated writing by hand. It was slow and painful and brought back unpleasant memories of frantically scratching away in a school book. I love the rapid erasure and recreating of digital writing; I love the ease of structuring information liberated from a particular physical correlate. And I especially like that I don’t have to carry stacks of notes with me.
And yet, despite this progressive horror of the material, I seek out and accumulate books wherever I go, and I crave their presence. They follow me around, like expensive wallpaper that I need to feel settled in a place. They’re the first thing I think of when I think of my room or what I need to move, and not having my books around me marks transience. At this point, most of what I need to pack seems to be books. I buy more books than I need or will read. I travel with books I’ve already read and probably won’t read again. Deciding which books to take where is a weighty matter, like constructing an intellectual and emotional landscape that will determine my journey.
In theory, I find the idea of e-books somewhat compelling. They seem brisk and efficient and the idea that a single small object can contain hundreds of books is especially enticing as I contemplate moving a room full of bookshelves. And yet I never use them. I read fifty pages on an e-book reader once and it was pleasant, but I’ve never done it since. It doesn’t strike me as an imaginative possibility; it just doesn’t seem part of the possible configurations that my experience allows.
It’s not that I like the smell of books, or their weight, or the memories lying in bed and reading brings back, though I do like all of these things. It’s not just that I like walking into someone’s home and seeing their mind laid out on their bookshelves or that I like the physical act of lending a book and returning a book. It seems somehow baser, something not just pre-cognitive but pre-emotional, like that their material presence has so shaped my way of interacting with the world that their absence troubles the unity of my experience. I imagine this is what it is to have your world determined by a certain technology in its particularity and to suddenly realize that that technology is slipping away. This seems like a common sentiment among the people I know (though it’s often expressed as, and I think confused with, an aesthetic disagreement with e-books). Perhaps we’re already part of an older generation that starts to find the world it’s growing into dissonant. I recognize that at some point in my life I’ll have to move to reading books electronically. I don’t know how this moment will come or what sort of person I’ll be then. I’m not even sure what I’ll have left to put in my room.