Lord knows there have been plenty of
distasteful books throughout the ages about any number of disgusting
subjects—books that never should have been written, published, or
read. And there have been any number of different formats books have
come in from scrolls to lambskin in gold plated wooden covers. But
they all had one thing in common, something very nearly sacred,
something that's a gift from God deserving of ultimate respect. They
allowed both mortals and the gods to exchange their thoughts and
feelings via the gift of words in a written code that could be passed
down throughout the ages and across the seas. And though the code
came in many varieties, some of them even arcane, that vehicle of
scribbled lines on a flat sheet never changed.
Now we've entered a new era of words,
still largely in ink, though on an electric screen, but still flat as
a piece of paper and mostly acceptable, at least for light reading.
But yonder beast with the serpent's head which is called Amazon is
making possible that which should have never been. That horrid
creature known as the interactive e-book. One can hear the monster
clear it's hissy throat even now.
I keep asking myself why they are doing
this. What's the point? This is something that clearly computers are
better at where people can use a keyboard and a mouse, or even a
joystick. Interactive Flash based websites and DVDs have been
available for at least 15 or 20 years now. They're great tools for
teaching, and the market is huge
and already in place. E-readers are simply not built for interaction,
nor should they be. They're built for reading. They're made to be
used as a simple book but with an entire library of thousands of titles
contained within. That's what they're good at. That's what they were
meant for.
Could it be that these Amazon infidels
simply were not brought up to respect good books? Would they really
be foolish enough to try to turn a book into a computer?
Anyone who had read the right books and
gotten the right things out of them would have too much respect for
the media itself to show such contempt for it by bastardizing it in
such a way as they intend. Had they been taught to respect books they
might have perceived that elusive golden thread which binds the inner
workings of the best of them from Homer to Plato to Virgil to
Pseudo-Dionysius to Dante, onward to Donne and Milton, to the
uneducated brilliance of Bunyan, the illuminations of Novalis and the
hard truths of the Ettrick Shepherd, to the "feeling intellect"
of Wordsworth and "far Ancestral voices" of Coleridge, to
the all-encompassing reality of Sunday in Chesterton's Thursday, to
the primordial reality behind the world in "The City" of
Charles Williams, and finally to Lewis' cave in Perelandra where
Aeneas, Kubla Khan, and Ransom join metaphors in a splendiferous ode
to The Well At The End Of The World.
It almost sounds like a religious
experience, doesn't it. That's the difference between those who
merely read a lot and those who are well read. The latter have a
respect for books that borders on veneration yet never crosses that
hallowed line.
Please Amazon, do not profane the
greatest of all media by polluting it with undignified paraphernalia.
If you don't understand the crime in that, you could not possibly
have anything of worth to sell anybody.
