Lughnasa Lughnasa Moon
Today I’ve had constant reminders of the physicality of books. They’re wide and their width has to be considered when packing them. Individually, as a rule, books are not heavy, but in the aggregate, they can be very heavy. Art books, printed on paper adequate for taking and retaining high quality color prints, are even heavier and today I have packed box after box of books on aesthetics, modern and contemporary art, art history, Chinese and Japanese art.
Over the course of these months since deciding to move, I’ve often wondered, is the last time I’ll do this in Minnesota? But packing these books, I wondered, am I among the last of those who will pack books for a move? Books are physical objects, present at the human level of perception in the world. The books I read on my kindle though are not physical objects, at least not in this macro sense. I cannot see the individual books, heft them, page through them, smell them.
This bothers some people a great deal, but not me. I’m not a bibliophile. I’m a lover of content and the medium is not so important to me. Reading the physical books is better for scholarly purposes, at least for now. In those books creating marginalia, paging through to a new idea, then back again is all part of the process of learning, at least for those of us who use texts. My guess is that there will come a time, not too long from now, when the readers will be what are often called digital natives. They will demand tools adequate for scholarship on their books of bits and bytes. And they will get them.
Then books will join scrolls and papyri as mediums for containing the word, the word having moved on to other less weighty realms. When I put my kindle in my backpack on that last day headed for Colorado, I’ll have 1,000 books or so along. And they’ll weigh less than a pound.