Monday
Ruth Ozeki’s Book of Form and Emptiness held me in thrall as Julia and I flew to a Carleton College reunion event last week, causing the four-hour flight to Phoenix to feel like a matter of minutes. One of the characters is the book itself, which periodically reflects on how books work. This, of course, is a matter that interests me deeply.
At one point, Book talks about how humans began fashioning objects out of “the world of things.” As Book puts it, “Then life happened, and eventually you people came along with your big, beautiful, bisected brains and clever opposable thumbs.”
The resulting explosion of artifacts led humans to divide matter “into two camps, the Made and the Unmade.” The Unmade—let’s call it nature—was relegated “to the status of mere resource, a lowly serf class to be colonized, exploited, and fashioned into something else, something that was more to your liking.” At first, books benefitted from this arrangement:
Within this social hierarchy of matter, we books lived on top. We were the ecclesiastical caste, the High Priests of the Made, and in the beginning you even worshipped us. As objects, books were sacred, and you built temples for us, and later, libraries in whose hushed and hallowed halls we resided as mirrors of your mind, keepers of your past, evidence of your boundless imaginations, and testimony to the infinitude of your dreams and desires.
“Why did you revere us so,” Book asks before providing an answer:
Because you thought we had the power to save you from meaninglessness, from oblivion and even from death, and for a while, we books believed we could save you, too. Of course we did. We were flattered! We prided ourselves on being semi-living, breathed into life by the animating power of your words. We thought we were so special. What folly.
It was folly, Book explains, because books became relegated to the world of just things—or as Book explains, books eventually became to be seen as “convenient tools you used until the next new-fangled device came along.”
Book here appears to be lamenting how we live in a capitalist world where everything has become instrumental, prized only for its use value. As enrollments decline in humanities courses while vocationally-oriented majors soar, one understands Book’s pessimism. It proceeds to wax nostalgic in making a desperate plea for continued relevance:
Did not the sequential form of our folios give shape to your stories and compel you to tell a certain kind of tale? Long, sinuous, patient tales that wound through time, teased forth by the slow, forward turning of our pages. They were beautiful stories we nailed together. Weren’t they?
Then, however, it laments, “even as our numbers increase, our life spans diminish…No sooner are we made than we are discarded, left to revert into unmade, disincarnate stuff. You turn us into trash, so how can we trust you?
Book concludes by apologizing for its “rant”: “No reader likes a rant. As a book, we should know better.” This particular burst of pessimism, however, is not Ozeki’s last word on the subject. I’ll share some other passages from Book of Form and Emptiness in future posts.
For the moment, I’ll just note that a blog like Better Living through Beowulf—Beowulf being a metonym for all literature—may appear at first glance to relegate books to the instrumental category. Haven’t I surrendered to the capitalist mindset in my endeavor to make a practical case as to why we should continue to read poems and stories and watch and read plays? By arguing that, in a down to earth way, they make our lives better, have I robbed them of some of their mystical power?
Of course, my hope is that, by showing how they touch upon so many aspects of our lives, spiritual and existential as well as material, I am working to re-elevate them to that ecclesiastical caste that Book refers to. Or rather, I am going in the other direction, seeing them as foundational to our existence. Literature, as I say in my blog’s mission statement, is as essential to our lives as food and shelter. Without it we are lost—although sometimes we realize this only at those times when we are confronted with life-challenging events.
When death or natural disaster strikes, we turn to it in the same way we fill churches following a natural or human-made disaster. The key is realizing that we have this resource available at other times as well. Why wait for our life to fall apart before seeking out ways to enrich it?
