Dying and furniture have been the dominant themes in my life for the last couple of weeks, but furniture hasn't really spoken to me yet, so I'm going the other way.
Just like places, people need things. The alternative is a Matrix kind of identity connected to an electronic reality, but the accessibility and convenience of electronic documents that inspire optimistic predictions of inevitable replacement for paper and ink may underestimate the sensual value of physical things glued together in a discrete unit.
For one thing, books provide a sense of physical engagement in a way that interface with electronic files does not. Keyboards and touch-screens, even voice commands, are plaintive kinds of requests for cooperation that we can never be completely confident will produce the desired response. Although a book represents a universe of politics, economics, psychology, and industry, a book also has a distinct separation from the powers of its production. Just considering cookies, for instance, (the electronic kind), illustrates that in most cases, the connections involved with electronic files are transparent but mysteriously unknown levels of programming, machine language, and marketing interests. We like to think they are benign or at least innocuous, but we don’t even know that for sure.
For books, there is at least a sense that the hidden effects of culture and enterprise are contained within the covers. The multivariant connections of the electronic are limitless and unknown for practical purposes. Every connection to an electronic file is an act of faith in very real ways, yet the book seems to define self-contained limits to intrusion from the outside. Pick up a book, and you have a container of information that you can consider at your convenience and by the most suitable means. A book depends on you. Electronic communication has a life of its own, but a book needs you.
Literature, printing, and even binding speak with subtle marketing rhetorics of design and persuasion, but for books, there is at least a sense of meeting them on our own terms, sort of figuratively (or even literally) curling up in the fat chair and making them ours, our space, our things. A Kindle-kind of electronic unit can replace text, maybe even a place in a fat chair, but that doesn’t replace a fast riff through the crisp pages of a new book or even the soft and slightly slippery pages of an old one.
Here's Thinking for You
Iffy
