The lonely library

A friend of mine has been berating me for my voracious book habit.  Yes, it's true.  My name is Colin Ellard and I have a problem.  It's gotten to the point where I have to leave my credit cards in the car when I go to browse the bookstore, else a week's grocery money is sucked out of my account in a matter of minutes.  The problem reached it's apotheosis (I hope) when I purchased a Kindle and found myself sitting in the big chair with the Books section of the newspaper in one hand and the Kindle in the other, finger poised over the one-click-purchase button.  Now I've hidden the Kindle from myself and I'm relying on the creep of middle-age memory loss to protect myself from myself.  But even though I can't find the thing, I received an email from it a couple of days ago complaining that the credit card attached to the Kindle store is overlimit and is being declined.  Wherever the machine is, it's apparently taken on a life of its own and is buying stuff, presumably using the famous Amazon "if you glanced at this page, we know you'll love a dozen of these..." ruse.

My friend went so far as to accuse me of hoarding knowledge.  She dared me to attach a "best before" date to any book that I purchased and if I hadn't cracked the spine before expiry I should hand the book over to someone else who might actually be able to make use of the thing for something other than filling up an empty corner of my apartment.  I love the idea, but I don't think my own weak spine will allow me to follow through.  I'd rather do something like this, though I'm not sure why.  Perhaps it's the appeal of the mushrooms.

My friend's jarring but well-intentioned attack on my bibliophilic impulse led me to start asking the hard questions and making some mental connections, and I've realized something important.  I've been spending a fair bit of time alone lately.  It's what I need, but I've noticed that the moments when I feel a bit of resistance to solitude are most likely to be the ones that find me with an itchy Amazon trigger finger or a GPS that stubbornly points me in the direction of the nearest book super-emporium (I tell myself I'm going for the candles and the potpourri, but even I can see through myself).  I buy books for all kinds of reasons, but one of them is to stave off loneliness, and I think this is something that's been going on  since the days when I was the geeky kid who, while my friends were out riding their cool bikes with those big banana seats and imagining what it would be like to get laid, I was the one with the membership in the Science Fiction Book Club and the Time-Life Library of Art.

It was with all of those thoughts roaming around today that I stumbled across this beautiful interview with Jonathan Franzen. I confess I've never read anything by Franzen (and my not having read The Corrections I suppose puts me in the same club as the 17 North Americans who haven't seen Avatar yet [and I haven't]), but this interview made me want to read everything he's written, beginning with this one (Oh Jeebus here we go again.)  You can scroll about halfway down to find the relevant bit (better to read the whole thing though) or here it is in excerpt:

AVC: How much do you think about the concept of readership? It’s changed so much, even since your last novel. It appears to be more about interactivity and instantaneous response, and about everyone having an equal voice. Do you think that can be good for literature? Is it changing how people read so much that it’s antiquating the experience of being alone with a novel? Or for your purposes, is it just irrelevant?

JF: Well, let me think where to begin. It’s something I’ve given a lot of thought to. I think novelists nowadays have a responsibility—whether or not my contemporaries are actually living up to it—to make books really, really compelling. To make you want to turn off your phone and walk away from your Internet connection and go spend some time in another place. That’s why it takes me so long to write these books. I’m trying to fashion something that will actually pull you away, so I’m certainly conscious of the tension between the solitary world of reading and writing, and the noisy crowded world of electronic communications.

I continue to believe it’s a phony palliative, most of the noise. You have the sense of “Oh yeah, I’m writing in my angry response to your post, and now I’m flaming back the person who flamed me back for my angry response.” All of that stuff, you have the sense, “Yeah, I’m really engaged in something. I’m not alone. I’m not alone. I’m not alone.” And yet, I don’t think—maybe it’s just me—but when I connect with a good book, often by somebody dead, and they are telling me a story that seems true, and they are telling me things about myself that I know to be true, but I hadn’t been able to put together before—I feel so much less alone than I ever can sending e-mails or receiving texts. I think there’s a kind of—I don’t want to say shallow, because then I start sounding like an elitist. It’s kind of like a person who keeps smoking more and more cigarettes. You keep giving yourself more and more jolts of stimulus, because deep inside, you’re incredibly lonely and isolated. The engine of technological consumerism is very good at exploiting the short-term need for that little jolt, and is very, very bad at addressing the real solitude and isolation, which I think is increasing. That’s how I perceive my mission as a writer—and particularly as a novelist—is to try to provide a bridge from the inside of me to the inside of somebody else. 

I think he's right that solitude and isolation are increasing, but is that increase being driven by techno-consumerism or is the staggering popularity of social networking a consequence of something else that's happening?  Logging off now to read a good book.

 

 

Comments

[Danny]

I love remembering an interview with an aged Vonnegut who admitted to being fine with cellphones since they're just like all other opiates for the masses, which he outspokenly believed to be vital for happy living, regardless of ignorance and awareness. In the end, digital social networks are just the latest instant gratification trends. If it weren't them, it'd be something else. People will never change -- only context and content does. Its just unfortunate if its true that modern readers need high-impact stimulation. ..Maybe we can blame the beat generation for one more thing and get the blame-game over with?

More importantly, I've recently decided to always be reading Faulkner alongside whatever else I'm reading, for the very reason mentioned several times in your post: absolute engrossment: impossibility to feel alone. I've never read a story teller with such a thick and impenetrable grip over language, like he transcended his body and place and became the Creator of Word.

[Colin]

HI Danny,

Thanks for your comments. Interesting, but I'm not sure I agree completely. I think that we *are* changing. Perhaps not in fundamental nature, but the combination of new ways of connecting with one another (or at least parts of one another) and old brain circuits causes new types of behaviour to arise, and perhaps even new definitions of self-hood. I think in some ways we feel as though we can never really be alone anymore without exerting great effort to shut everything off and out. In other ways, we're more alone than ever because so many of our connections are fleeting, ephemeral, unreal, borne only on electrons.