That’s why we need books, and why I believe they will survive. Because most humans have a desire to engage in deep thought and deep concentration. Those muscles are necessary for deep feeling and deep engagement. Most humans don’t just want mental snacks forever; they also want meals. The twenty hours it takes to read a book require a sustained concentration that’s hard to get anywhere else. Sure, you can do that with a DVD boxset too — but your relationship to TV will always ultimately be that of a passive spectator. With any book, you are the co-creator, imagining it as you go. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, literature is the only art form in which the audience plays the score.

I’m not against e-books in principle — I’m tempted by the Kindle — but the more they become interactive and linked, the more they multitask and offer a hundred different functions, the less they will be able to preserve the aspects of the book that we actually need. An e-book reader that does a lot will not, in the end, be a book. The object needs to remain dull so the words — offering you the most electric sensation of all: insight into another person’s internal life — can sing.

So how do we preserve the mental space for the book? We are the first generation to ever use the internet, and when I look at how we are reacting to it, I keep thinking of the Inuit communities I met in the Arctic, who were given alcohol and sugar for the first time a generation ago, and guzzled them so rapidly they were now sunk in obesity and alcoholism. Sugar, alcohol and the web are all amazing pleasures and joys — but we need to know how to handle them without letting them addle us.

Photo by seo_gun via flickr, (Creative Commons)

[S]omewhere around 2003 the texture of daily life inside Western media-driven societies began to morph, and quickly, to the point where, a half-decade later, it’s now obvious to people who were around in the twentieth century that time not only seems to be moving more quickly, but is beginning to feel funny, too. There’s no more tolerance for waiting of any sort. We want all the facts and we want them now. To go without email for forty-eight hours can trigger a meltdown. You can’t slow down, even once, without becoming irrelevant. Music has become more important because it is a constant. School reunions are beside the point because we already know what our old classmates have done. Children often spend more time in dreamland and cyberspace than in real life. Time is speeding up even faster.

The answer from Tufts University neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf is encouraging: “I totally believe that you are a different person for having read [a] book.”

She goes on:

There is a difference between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory. The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.

“I don’t. I read books by my friends. Now and then if a book comes along that’s a real ordeal, I read it. I’m not looking for a well-written book. I’m looking for a book about something that appeals to me, an ordeal appeals to me, a place I’ve never been that’s written about in a penetrating way. I’m not looking for someone just joyriding or a stunt, someone riding a bicycle somewhere or whatever it is. But people used to talk about the death of the novel. That’s a kind of normal reaction to too much of something. But there will always be travel books, as long as there are places to go.

–Sept. 1, 2008