What you say is true, Maria. Nevertheless, as a person of minimal
property, I must say that the web suits me very well. I would indeed fight
over a computer -- over access to information, libraries, etc. I don't
know that I have ever really learned to value the
book, the note in the margin, the fingerprint, the
autograph. Nevertheless, I have just returned about three hundred books to
the library. I'd had many of them for three years. I have spent days and
days erasing my marginal notes. You could say I love these books. Yet I
think part and parcel of my experience of moving -- and I am just leaving a
place I have been for three years, the longest
I have stayed anywhere since I left "home" at 18 -- is an incremental
slackening of attachment to property. I am of a borrower mentality. I
thank the lord, if I can borrow him for a moment, that I'm alive in the
digital age. One of the books I gave back in recent days is a book of
poems written by several generations of one family and published in England
in 1813. You can imagine what it was like having this book lying
around. Amazing! Still, when I was leaving it back, reluctantly, my
partner said to me -- when that book was published Beethoven was alive,
Blake was alive, Coleridge was alive. I wanted to keep it all the more,
looking again at the print, the font, the orthography, feeling the
thickness of the paper. But I was so delighted I could freely have such a
book! Also, although the words of my partner made me want to keep the
book, equally they replaced it for me: ricocheted me into an imaginative
space that that very volume might have occupied. Once a guy I knew wrote a
poem registering disgust at seeing a fingerprint on the otherwise pristine
page of a book. Often, I have thought if times got bad we could boil up
some of our books and get a reasonably healthy stew. Ultimately, I
appreciate the diffident emphatic structure of the web, its invisible
straight lines and this mad window we have right now when there are no
price-tags beyond those on your software and hardware, and on your
time. The book as a precious object: I dunno. Religion and poetry are
close enough without making relics of anything to do with writing. That said,
my very same partner mentioned above, whom I have retained much longer than
lodgings, cherishes pens even above me, so it takes all kinds.
Mairead
At 02:31 PM 6/17/01 +1000, you wrote:
>"I think you have just demonstrated, Maria, that these tracings and
>connections continue on the web.
>Mairead"
>
>Thanks Mairead - I would agree in one sense - that yes, on the web, we make
>connections of mind and thought - but as sentient beings, I think there is
>a distinct and unique pleasure in the tactile nature of texts, in the actual
>handling and sighting, as well as in the unique relationship that is created
>between a past owner of a text through their own marks made on the text, and
>the current reader or literally 'holder' of that precious moment.
>
>That, I think, is a connection that occurs most purely and honestly in the
>physical realm of experience.
>
>I can share, in words on the web, my experience of owning a copy of James
>Macauley's works of Dryden, with marks in pencil made by the poet on the
>page. But it is only in actually tracing the outline of the marks with my
>eyes on the page, or by feeling the tactile nature of the paper, that a
>connection with both the printed word and the mind of a previous reader can
>be made that does not seem possible any other way.
>
>Perhaps it comes down to the physical intimacy of the moment of connection -
>between the "I" of the reader (in present time), the "I" of the poet (in
>thought) and the "I" of the reader that has gone before (the past)- leaving
>their marks on the page.
>
>regards
>
>maria
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