I have always loved books, both for their content and for their form. The same is true of my wife, Helen. As a consequence, the Farm is home to far more volumes than sanity might suggest is prudent. Most of them are plain and designed for everyday reading; some few of them are exquisite and designed primarily for our admiration, as they are individual works of art.
My love of books began early. Along with my siblings, I shared a small library of children’s books that had been given to my mother in her childhood and augmented over time by communal purchase. These books were well-loved, with many a scrawl of delighted wonder adorning their pages written primarily in crayon or pencil. Writing in these books was strictly forbidden by my mother, but each of us got carried away at times and put our personal stamp of approval on some especially appealing volume. There are only a few of these specific volumes remaining, and each time I handle one of them memories of another time come alive – a lost time before the unrelenting squeal of electronics; a time when imagination rather than imposed artifice ruled the mind waves.
Books freed me from whatever shackles I endured as a child. For a good book fires the imagination and creates a belief that one can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone he or she wants. And a sparking of the imagination leads to dreams, and dreams – even the most elusive – are always to be chased, always to be pursued over the course of a lifetime. Once imagination is sparked, all that is needed is a gentle push and a little willpower to begin a voyage of discovery – the sort of gentle push that comes from a parent reading to a child the sort of gentle push that can escalate into a rocket ride when a child learns to read on his or her own and has the will to run free.
I just finished reading a book in which the author’s primary thesis is that certain moments come along which are destined to alter the course of a life, moments that render once-possible alternate timelines impossible by the choices we humans must make at such times. This view of life is resonant with the concept of Fate, is very like that faced when using computer software – you must make a choice at a fork in the software’s decisional tree, and proceed down one of its branches to the exclusion of another. This is of the essence of computer software, and this, I suspect, is the reason why achieving the concept of Artificial Intelligence is so difficult. For in the living of a real life, this thesis is only momentarily true and is the stuff of circumstantial hypnosis – not the stuff of dreams.
In real life we can consider other possibilities even after choosing to take the left-hand fork in the road. We do this by dreaming of having chosen the right-hand fork instead and by our nearly constant contemplation of other potential realities beyond those presented to us at any particular fork in the road. Books are the usual means by which we pursue these alternate realities even as we travel our particular narrow lane of choice. Reading frees us from our own narrow path so that we may consider becoming everything from space pirates to cowboys, from detectives to serial killers, from a person of a different gender to a person of a different color, from Walter Mitty to Natty Bumppo – and everything in between and the infinity beyond.
And by keeping these dreams alive, we can go so far in a real life as to revisit our earlier choice of path and choose a new one to travel in future.
Books are the sparks of the imagination fostering our dreams. Specific books suggest specific alternative realities; an aggregation of books is of the essence of the concept of possibility. As I write, I am sitting in an honest-to-God library: a library we chose to build after we’d paid our mortgage; a library which required a new mortgage to finance it. At the time I wondered if I was insane; I now know that insanity is the stuff of life. For our library ensures us equally of savoring the promise of dreams represented by each newly purchased book and of memories gripped tightly by each previously read volume. It is this interaction of memory and dream that fuels thought; it is thought that fuels new or supplemental dreams; and dreams are the fuel of a real life, even as they are the bane of those seeking to create Artificial Intelligence.
So to those who prefer their Kindles, Kobos, Nooks, iPads, or whatever have you, here’s to you. They are better than nothing, and, admittedly, they are convenient devices, take up far less space than our library, and cost much less to own. But they lack the heft of our books, and they only partially fire the imagination. For I can look around me and remember my sojourn with Robin Hood and Friar Tuck in Sherwood Forest, remember my time drifting down the Mississippi River on a raft with Huck and Jim, remember my incarceration in the Chateau d’If along with Edmond Dantes, remember my time riding the sandworms of Dune – not through the courtesy of an electronic aid, but by holding and contemplating the very volume through which I first savored these experiences.
As a former partner of mine was wont to say: “To each his own, said the Old Lady as she kissed the cow.”
