Shakespeare died today. So did Cervantes. It’s also Nabokov’s birthday, although this year it seems the gift is ours. And, if you believe the old historians, it’s Shakespeare’s birthday as well. (There’s some argument about that: the only record we have of his birth is a baptismal entry in the parish church of Stratford-upon-Avon dated April 26, 1564, along with the legend that he was born and died on the same day.) All this shuffling onto and off this mortal coil led UNESCO to designate April 23 World Book and Copyright Day. Their intention was to celebrate books and authors, but simply the fact of designating a day in their honor suggests to me a ritual of mortality.
Books are a strangely fragile technology, just paper, ink, and glue, and their cultural influence is waning, replaced by an even more fragile technology: a web of light, which can vanish in a moment when the power fails. We entrust our thoughts to these fragile vessels, as if scattering seeds in the hope that a few traces will survive us. Digital technology casts those seeds more widely ??? the fancy word here is dissemination ??? but in less enduring form. That’s a concern for me: are we allowing ourselves to be entranced by these flashes of light, and so forgetting about the future? A book can live on long after its author dies, but it often happens strangely through an act of forgetfulness: a single copy lies untouched in an Irish monastery too remote to be plundered, or turns up ??? if only in fragments ??? in an ancient garbage dump unearthed by archaeologists. What will remain of our thoughts if we write them only in light? One day, the lights will go out.
Still, I’ve been thinking recently about how books die.
Some burned, some pulped, some simply forgotten. Some stillborn in our minds, some dead of neglect, some strangled in their cradles by a critic’s contempt. We don’t mourn for books, or the life that passed into them during their creation, because we rarely know about their loss. Those that die usually do so without ceremony, like the wordless exhalations that take place each day in nursing homes, public hospitals, or prison wards, where death is an act of forgetting and a problem of remains.
Books turn more readily to dust than men. When the buildings in these photographs finally collapse, the pages will be torn, scattered, and then slowly entombed. The wind will whisper through the cracks, tossing the bits of paper, so that words lose their order until all human meaning drains away. What remains will be a word-midden, lying there forgotten beneath our feet until the archaeologists come digging in the dust. And from this digging more books will be born.
And yet what to me is this quintessence of dust? For all the tourist pilgrimages to Shakespeare’s grave in Stratford-upon-Avon, we don’t think much about the bones that lie there, even though his gravestone asks us not to trouble them. It is his words that have survived, and with them, something of his mind. A miraculous kind of resurrection takes place as we read, as the author seems to breathe again within us. That’s a miracle that only books can work. For all the fascination they currently hold for us, digital media often seem to act more like mirrors than windows into another soul: we’re too busy shaping our own images there to see deeply into someone else’s mind. (Though this may change as we train our eyes to be less impatient and our minds to expect more from what we find online.)
If books are dust, then in this they are more like us than these flashes of light that you now read. Fragile, but strangely enduring, they are made to carry life. (And often made, it seems, with as little care, in momentary acts of commerce between fame and greed.) We’ve found better ways to cast our seeds, but none as moving, just as we’ve created more efficient objects of our inarticulate desires, and yet none so enduring. I find it encouraging that one thing digital media can do is to revive books at the moment of their vanishing. But that makes sense, since all new forms of media derive from that complex machine that Gutenberg made. Open up a computer, and what you find in that soulless hollow is the ghost of a book.
Books may be slowly dying away, but like Shakespeare or Cervantes, they leave us the best part of themselves. Still, it’s up to us to make sure that the spirit of the book survives this return to dust. All poetry aside, we need both dust and light: digital media can reach readers far more quickly and efficiently than books, but it is in books that our souls endure.