Post 2: What is a Book?

A book is a memory. We live in a world of fast-paced, convenience-driven masses. We rush from one place to the next, only making time for what makes time for us. And while it may have always been this way in our lives, we can all look back to our youth, and remember how slowly it went. It was a time where we appreciated every detail, even if we didn’t know what it meant to do that. We were in awe of the simplest things; the fireflies in our backyard, the birds soaring overhead… we took time to look around. It is not lost on me that the demands grow as we get older. But if we can think back to our childhood, and remember what stimulated this awestruck curiosity with the world, we can remember being read to and our slow evolution from picture book to the A to Z Mystery series. We got this imagination when we opened a new book. We never peeked over our parents’ arm to look at the screen they were reading off of. We looked to see the pages in the book; how many we had left, how many words were littered onto the page. While e-books are more convenient in more than one way, there is a loss of something when a real book is replaced. When we sit down and read a physical book, one with pages and binding, we are able to slip back into that peaceful slowness of our youth. When we look at a screen, it resembles a computer or phone, things we use to get information quickly and efficiently, whether we realize it consciously or not. LaValle may think of my opinion as ‘melodramatic nonsense’, but there is a place in everyone’s heart that craves this nostalgic happiness, when we can reflect on our youth, and perhaps for a while, escape there. As Piazza says, ‘[A book] is a gesture of faith in the future.’ Faith that no matter how old we get, and however things change for us, we still have the simplest constant, and a way to transport ourselves back in time.