My book by Jack Levin came in the mail yesterday. It is signed by Jack Levin himself, and, with an added special touch, signed also by the intrepid Mark Levin, son of Jack. Decorated with a stunningly beautiful picture of Washington’s crossing and with copious pictures throughout, this short tome on Washington’s crossing of the Delaware (the title is George Washington: The Crossing) gives the feeling that is impossible to receive from an e-book. I had the overwhelming sensation when I opened the box and removed Levin’s book that I was holding something special and instinctively treated it with reverence. My immediate sermon to my sons: you may read it, and I expect you to read it. But do not remove it from my desk, wash your hands before taking it up, and disfigure it at the risk of spending your adolescence staring at the four walls of your bedroom. Holding a real book (one has to specify now-a-days to differentiate from the awful dawning of the e-reader), or many books, that is, is a thing of beauty that cannot be replicated. A book—and especially one of the quality of Jack Levin’s (or Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or Durant’s History of Civilization or Sandburg’s Lincoln or Pearcy’s Saving Leonardo or Bennett’s Book of Virtues (no, though I own them all, I’ve not read them all!), or, most of all, a leather-bound King James Bible) tells you intuitively that you are holding something that is unique and meaningful. Books of the stature of these reach their soft hands into your heart and never let go. Which brings a question to my mind that I wonder if others ever consider: How does the relationship of the book lover to the material he reads change when he downloads words into an e-reader rather than holding the actual tome in his hands? What process of transformation into a more civilized lover of the transcendent is lost when the lover (or potential lover) of books is booted from perusing the dusty bookshelves of a used bookstore or the irresistible maze of the aisles of a Border’s (remember them?) or a Barnes and Noble, to clicking on Amazon or any other online store? How does the challenge to pass on one’s love for books to his children abruptly and coldly shift when breathing the musty air of the corner bookstore no longer becomes an option? Is there something metaphysical that Amazon et, al. can never give that your real life, tangible books and bookstores can—such as the tempering of character gained from reading the work of the writer who spent his blood and sweat and tears wrestling with his thoughts and syntax and conveying his heart and soul to the printed page for his readers; such as the sense that few places where we assemble (save church and home) in life are like the bookstore, where a holy hush descends on all of those who enter? Such as knowing that we are among a small but like-minded remnant of those who seek higher things: truth and what came before us, and—hopefully—the God who created all things? Or am I being melodramatic? Mostly, I think, I am not. A man’s books become an extension of himself. We absorb them by reading and re-reading them and then meditating on what they have told us; and they become a part of us. Afterward we place them ceremoniously on our shelves where they become an icon of what we now have learned and believe. We display them like trophies won on the field of sport, and they become a symbol of what is now inside of us. An e-reader can never do most of that—can never rise to that level of transformation. Amazon—though now forced to use her for lack of options—will fail to do the transcendent work of the bookstore every time.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:05:16 +0000
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