A copy of Shakespeare’s collected plays wedges itself between bookends and several issues of literary magazines on the kitchen counter. It’s an odd home for literature, but what better breakfast than iambic pentameter in the morning light?
Did you know you can download the complete works of Shakespeare online–for free? You can download it and place the bits and bytes somewhere on your computer’s hard drive. Small ones and zeros represent some of the greatest verse written in the English language. Compare that micro file taking up a fraction of space on a personal computer to the five-pound black clothed volume trimmed in fading gold leaf collection of comedy and tragedy and history.
I try to live a simple life, but I can’t bear the thought of removing a Shakespeare tome and replacing it with a desktop icon that is smaller than a thumbnail. I can’t flip through a digital file—only scroll down through those never ending windows of copy. Even small books I can’t remove from my library. A hardcover reprint of Gibran’s The Prophet from the 60’s rests underneath a Kenny Wayne Shepherd audio CD and Sylvia Plath’s final collection. Plath’s original hardback seems to smell of its survival of the Kennedy assassination and the Cold War. I wrap myself in the yellowed musty pages of a twenty-five cent copy of Tortilla Flats and enjoy a dollar reprint paperback of Hesse’s Gertrude featuring a Milton Glaser cover design. That silly desktop icon looks so feeble and anemic next to Annie Dillard’s slim copy of The Writing Life.
I know the information is the same in pulp as it is in bites. Its pixeled letters converted from Garamond to electronic on and off switches that splash across a computer’s monitor. But page turning is an activity that warrants laud when the final page has been accomplished.
Words should be handled, pages touched, paperback spines broken, hard covers smashed on a table surface with the weight of its literary value. Throw the book at them? You can’t throw a desktop icon. It just blinks at me from a hard drive, pleading to me of its authenticity. Yes, the electronic clone has words and chapters and line breaks like a book. The digital literature has been authored and represents great stories like a book.
But an e-book can’t feel or smell of being read on a beach during summer vacation—grains of sand falling from the pages as a reminder of the event. It doesn’t have the human stain of being held nor can you place a fallen autumn leaf between the pages of a Hemingway novel. There are no inscriptions on a PDF book’s end pages reading “To my son for Christmas 2004.” Not even the sound of being removed from my canvas bag and thumbed open to where the bookmark (an old gas station receipt) reminds me of last night’s reading. An electronic book can never replace the printed page. The word must be tangible to be loved. The digital icon only reminds me of the lovely manuscript on my kitchen counter.
(c) Matthew Mulder. All rights reserved.
Originally published in The Indie, September 2005
Coffeehouse Junkie 