The time of the book

The perception was that the essential quality of writing was its separation of mental material from mortal grey matter. Word and idea were disembodied and stabilized in order to travel through time, not to be infinitely multiplied in the present...

[t]he general and implacable human determination to fill endless space with dubious mental material when life is short and there are so many other things to be done.

---Tim Parks.

~

This picture which, no doubt, will also soon disappear reminded you of the old Foyles, teeming with books stacked up haphazardly, sometimes in large piles on the floor so that you had to be careful where you tread. The religion section in particular was always very chaotic and a lot of the titles were obscure-or at least they seemed to be. I suppose it was the time before religion was 'sexy'. I don't think there were any computers around and you doubt if there was a huge marketing and promotion machine behind the book. Each book just sat there quietly, a small dream, not "recommended"-except by word of mouth, the old fashioned way still surviving somehow.

It was exhausting looking for anything in those days. Now, of course, everyone knows what they want and thanks to the reviews and the prizes and the internet you'll never find something you weren't looking for. 

You sometimes wonder about the time of the book. Not about whether the book is now outdated given the emergence of other ways to distract oneself, other information technologies-must the book be reduced to those categories?-given, indeed, people's shorter attention spans. But the time that is in a book, the time we lose in a book, time lost to life. How does time get condensed, how does it deepen and gravitate around a sentence, a startling turn of phrase? How are we opened up to other times, other perceptions (are these one and the same thing?) What kind of duration is there in a book and why does the experience of reading one, with all its artificiality, seem more real than your own life (and that is said by someone who is not, unlike anton, the dougal, a great reader)?

Or there was these wonderful lines from Illich:

'In the train of my thoughts, I am aware of the parentheses, the italics, the paragraphs, the need for a footnote here, an idea out of the bibliography there. In the plans I have for this next semester, some periods are blocked out, others underlined. On my memory's note pad with the agenda for lunch with Professor Marzhan, two new translations of Winnie the Pooh into African languages stand, right after the title of a new journal, Symposion, dedicated to "con-bibiality." When I tell you my thoughts, it's as if I were reading them off from inside me. To an alarming degree, the structure of the page is the outline of my thoughts, plans and memories. My experience is biblionomic; I have become a biblionome.

 Even in the liveliest and most intimate conversations, I am reminded of books next to the faces of people. I know where a certain book stands, I remember its size and type face exactly. I know I got an idea I'm discussing in a paragraph on a right-hand page, somewhere in the lower third. As with a colleague whose mustache I remember before I can hit on his name, so with the color of a book's binding before I can bring up its title.

Again and again, a page will serve to orient me. I continually turn to a page, and am turned on by a page. All this make me a bibliotrope.'

---Ivan Illich.