A Reader on Reading

That is why, for Augustine, the words on the page — not the perishable scroll or replaceable codex that held them—had physical solidity, a burning, visible presence. For me, the solidity is in the edifice of the electronic device, not in the fleeting words. When silent, the phantom text, eerily materializing on the screen and vanishing at the drop of a finger, is certainly different from the sturdy, authoritarian black letters meticulously composed on a piece of parchment or stamped on the page. My electronic text is separated from me by a screen, so that I cannot directly kiss the words as Augustine might have done in his devotion, or inhale the perfume of leather and ink as the contemporaries of Carpaccio did in theirs. This accounts for the difference in the vocabulary used by Augustine and myself to describe the act of reading. Augustine spoke of “devouring” or “savoring” a text — a gastronomical imagery derived from a passage in Ezekiel, in which an angel commands the prophet to eat a book, an image repeated later in the Revelation of Saint John. I instead speak of “surfing” the Web, of “scanning” a text. For Augustine, the text had a material quality that required ingestion. For the electronic reader, the text exists only as a surface that is skimmed as he or she “rides the waves” of information from one cyber area to another.

Does all this mean that our reading craft has declined, lost its most precious qualities, become debased or impoverished? Or has it rather improved, progressed, perfected itself since Augustine’s hesitant days? Or are these meaningless questions?

For many years now we have been prophesying the end of the book and the victory of the electronic media, as if books and electronic media were two gallants competing for the same beautiful reader on the same intellectual battlefield. First film, then television, later video games and DVDs and virtual libraries have been cast as the book’s destroyers, and certain writers — Sven Birkerts, for example, in The Gutenberg Elegies—do not hesitate to use apocalyptic language full of calls for salvation and curses against the Antichrist. All readers may be Luddites at heart, but I think this may be pushing our enthusiasms too far. Technology will not retreat, nor, in spite of countless titles predicting the twilight of the printed word, do the numbers of new books printed every year show signs of diminishing.

And yet changes will occur. It is true that before most great turning points in technology, the previous technological form experiences a flourish, a lastminute exuberance. After the invention of the printing press, the number of manuscripts produced in Europe increased dramatically, and canvas painting mushroomed immediately after the invention of photography. It seems more than likely that even though the number of printed books is higher than ever, certain genres now available mainly as codices will give way to other formats, better suited for their purpose. Encyclopedias, for instance, will find more efficient homes in electronic containers, once the technology develops a more intelligent cross-referencing system and not one that simply throws up, with mechanical nonchalance, every example, however irrelevant.

But these are obvious transformations. Essentially, nothing precious need be lost. It may be that the qualities we nostalgically wish to retain in books as they appear now, and as the humanist readers imagined them, will reappear under clever guises in the electronic media. We can already scribble on electronic paper, and there are e-books reduced to fit in the reader’s hand. The woman in the subway reading her paperback novel and the man next to her listening to the thud-thud bass of his iPod, the student making notes on the margins of her textbook and the child playing a handheld Nintendo by her side will all combine their instruments (as certain mobile phones do now) in a single portable apparatus that will offer all these textual possibilities: displaying text, reciting, allowing for annotations and proposing playful modes of research on one small portable screen or by some other yet-to-be-invented device — a device that, like Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, will allow for a sort of mini-opera, in which all the senses must come into play in order to re-create and enhance a text.

So why do we fear the change?