“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
I don't know what I'd do without my books. Remember the book
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury? It was set in a dystopian future in which firemen intentionally burn any house in which a book is located, because it's against the law to possess them. In the end, a fireman who had grown to love books. escapes the city of quick, mindless but big screen, reality based entertainment, to find a small group of book-loving refugees banded together. Each person is assigned the memorization of one complete book -- Aristotle, Dickens, James Joyce and more -- so the books will survive until society is ready to embrace them again
I don't read a lot of popular novels, though I have a rather large collection of classic Sci-Fi. When my grade school classmates were reading The BoxCar Children and Pippi Longstocking, I was reading the works of Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein and a whole world beyond my quiet, hushed one at home, opened up to me.
Reading is for me not just intellectual but embracive. I love the way the spine of a book feels in the crook of my fingers. The smooth, hard end boards snug on either side of the pages sewn together, their edges flush and perfect. The smell of ink, the texture of a page as my fingers gently turns it.
I tend to read a lot of non fiction and books that teach you how to create and maintain things. I like to read of history.
I love reading about long ago. know more about my own life when I know more about the past. It's a sense of perspective; of days full of people that killed, tortured, struggled and suffered, agonizing for things that were of the utmost importance to them; working and living for reasons that may be well the same as ours. Now they've been gone some 500 years and all that is left to us is the essence and quintessence of their lives so I can remember all that they never forgot.
To me, history is more than a story, more than a book, it's the life, the heart and soul of ages long ago. It's the ultimate myth and inevitably ambiguous, but I do believe, as Lord Bolingbroke stated, "
History is philosophy teaching by example and also by warning." History not read is like ammo not used, someone once said, and without reading, for myself at least, the past is silence and the future is haze.
Quantum Physicists have stated that time, as most of us think of it, is an illusion. They have postulated that the past,the present and the future are here, now, captured in a touch, the blink of an eye, or perhaps,simply between two pages.
Between two pages here is a photo of Mom in her garden. Outside the window here now, a plant opens up, spilling forth its seed onto the soil. I remember days of working in the flowerbeds that my Mom so lovingly maintained. After her death, I kept it going as long as I could for my Dad, until adulthood called me away. As I toiled in the garden, the sun kissed the top of my head, the touch a benediction, a blessing.
I had not yet learned of other kisses, the ones in the crook of the neck where the head joins the body and the body knows not its limitations. The one that dances on the skin like light that falls upon it, outstretched hands gathering fistfuls of flowers imprinted upon starched cotton. I had not yet learned that love is not just as wild as the flowers; it’s as fragile and elusive as glass; that in nature, the most delicate of things are often trod underfoot as they go unnoticed. So much contained in those pages never read.
At the bookstore recently, an engineering manual, two generations old, was opened to browse. In it was an ancient leaf, carefully pressed within the pages, the person who had done so likely long gone. I have many books like that old book, purchased from stores that contain more light than dust, yet containing within them things old and forgotten, things that in the wrong hands would only grow older. Finding the right one is like finding treasure, fingers tracing the spine, fingers that are gentle and forgiving, not wishing any further scar upon that which binds.
Such books find their way home, where they lay looking out from under leaded glass, pulled out to be read on late nights, the mind marveling that other minds marveled, the mysteries, the mistakes, playing out across the pages as if they were penned today. They tell their tales like the lonely, animated elderly, to anyone who is willing to listen, lessons given without rancor or heat, so many words that need to be said while they can still be heard.
Nothing for me is worse than being in the back of an airplane or at a hotel with nothing to read. When in one mountainous far off place, I had to downsize a bag as the little airplane being piloted by what I believe was a Yeti, was weight restricted and my books were left behind for materials I had to have for the mission. I almost would have given up my tools, my poncho and my hiking boots than my little collection of paperbacks, of
Earth Abides and
Stranger in a Strange Land and a small leather bound book of Shakespeare sonnets.
Let the weather play God with my itinerary, let the tanker bringing in supplies break down somewhere, let the post sell the last bottle of whiskey, but if I'm laid up alone in the middle of no where after I bust a move down the Himalayas and break my leg, I want a book. Curled up in strange places among a couple artifacts of family that get toted around in my suitcase, I may be lonely, but I will be be content.
For I have a book.
It's a big old paper dead tree book, because I want to hold something in my hand that feels alive, to me even if a living thing died to create its pages. It's words that form pictures, laid out upon a living thing that never slept, never dreamed of the soft perch of birds or the sharp blade of the ax, never mourned the tender leaves that it nourished and abandoned. It’s a piece of wood, that which can be warmth, support and shelter, or the perfect, pristine bed of memory laid down bare.
Such is it tonight. I am alone for a bit, Partner working late. But in my head is history, the cries of warriors, rushing forth immortal beneath disported sabers and brandished flags, men rushing forward into time, propelled by gunpowder and righteousness, underneath a sky of thunder. I have a book. I am caught up in battles, in loves, both forbidden and forgotten, coursing like blood as long as the words will, that immortal, fresh, abiding blood which bears respect above regret and commitment above the ease of dishonor.
My work is put aside for at least an hour or two before bed and I'll pick up that book. I'll let it transport me to somewhere far away, until a chime will toll for warriors, for battles won and those so easily lost. As my hand turns the pages, I will move among people who lived and died, or perhaps never existed at all, their shadows not of flesh of blood but of imagination, shadows as strong as finely honed steel and shadows as quiet as murmuring breath, forgotten until they were put upon paper.
Then, on the sound of that chime, perhaps a clock, perhaps something that just travels within me, the note cutting the air, as sharp, clear and quiet as a blade, I will fall off into sleep. The book lays prone on the nightstand next to me, two forms, creating one shadow, the stories in both of us, never ceasing, even at rest. Outside the world continues in that illusion of change, the sky letting go of its tears, washing a parched landscape anew. - Brigid
