Notes On A Revolution

Good question.

Maybe I’m a sucker for nostalgia. Wait, let me start again - I’m a sucker for nostalgia, but maybe that is beside the point. I was visiting your friend and mine Scott not long after my Kindle arrived. Scott has the kind of bookshelf you figure Nicholas Nassim Taleb must be referring to when he writes about visiting Umberto Eco at the beginning of The Black Swan. In both that case and the case of my good friend Scott, the point is not how much has been read, but but how much is still to learn.

But I digress.

My thought, having moved all over the world with intentions to do so a bit more before I’m done, was that looked like an expensive bookshelf. Not the shelf itself (no disrespect Scott, you know I think your apartment is tastefully furnished), but the quantity of books. And not even to buy; I’m talking about the moving of them, form one location to another.

Having travelled so much the last few years, I have shown some restraint in book buying (those who know me will ask for evidence of this restraint, of which there is little), but stil paid hundreds of dollars to ship them around. Having a Kindle now and walking into a place like Scott’s house makes me feel equal parts sad and yet not envious. Henry Ward Beecher once wrote “Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house”, and even in the absence of the need for books, I think they still finish a room like few objects can.

I digress. Again.

While I have travelled, I have, when buying furniture, opted for Ikea, due to its relative cheapness and acknowledging I will not have it for more than a few years, at which point I will very likely leave the country. I imagine at some point in the future I will have found that city to call home, and alongside the bed or couch I’ve secretly desired all this time I will erect and fill shelves of books. I wonder if, at that point, I will head to Amazon, collate a list of the books residing on my Kindle (or whatever device I’m using then), and purchase them all. I’d be doing so only to have them collect dust for the most part, but then it seems to me there are worse fates.

So maybe digital media, the digital books on my device, are purchases of convenience rather than aesthetics. And maybe one day, when I grow up and settle down, I’ll invest in the texture and scent of a leather couch and a wall of well-worn paper backs. Maybe my ebooks are like my Ikea bookshelf, passing presences in my life not made for the long haul.

Maybe.

Maybe not.