In the introduction to The Love of Books: The Philobiblon of Richard De Bury, Matthew Battles writes that “It is this continuity — this intimacy across time — that Bury held to be one of the chief merits of the book.” This was the phrase that stopped me — this intimacy across time - and started me thinking about virtual books and what our attachments would be overtime to our new emerging historical electronica.
But first, let’s for a minute appreciate the beauty in Bury’s 12th century expression of his love for books.
In books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I forsee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace. . .
For the meaning of the voice perishes with the sound; truth latent in the mind is wisdom that is hid and treasure that is not seen; but truth which shines forth in books desires to manifest itself to every impressionable sense. It commends itself to the sight when it is read, to the hearing when it is heard, and moreover in a manner to the touch, when it suffers itself to be transcribed, bound, corrected and preserved.
What accounts for this intimacy, this love and affection? Does the physicality of a book, the touch and feel, so closely identified with the embedded ideas, establish an emotional framework for our attachment to those ideas? Books in De Bury’s time were elaborate physical affairs, engineered constructions for words, truth, vision, science and, of course, the afterlife. So do electronic books deploy the same kick in the ontological gut that drives this kind of intellectual intensity?
Bury claimed allegiance to ideas: “Now truth is chiefly maintained and contained in books - nay, they are written truth itself, since by books we do not mean the materials of which they are made.”
But he also speaks as a book, in the first person, as though it were a living, breathing, sentient thing — as in the complaints which books harbor about the ways they are treated, the injuries and treacheries they suffer, at the hands of humanity:
. . . new authors’ names are imposed upon us by worthless compilers, translators and transformers, and losing our ancient nobility, while we are reborn in successive generations, we become wholly degenerate; and thus against our will the name of some wretched stepfather is affixed to us, and the sons are robbed of the names of their true fathers. . .
Oftentimes we have had to endure barbarous interpreters . . .
And hence it is that we have to mourn for the homes of which we have been unjustly robbed; and as to our coverings, not that they have not been given to us, but that the coverings anciently given to us have been torn by violent hands, insomuch that our soul is bowed down to dust, our belly cleaved unto the earth. . . we are diseased with jaundice.
My god man, will we ever find the depth of that sentiment to our electronic writings? Can one love virtual books in the same way? Bury is the voice of the unread, unkempt and unappreciated books that mock you from your bookshelf. How will virtual books fill that role with their voices hidden and buried in the miscellaneously organized electronic universe? Will they only nag us through the machinations of our search engines?
Alas, this is a lamentation that will soon be history itself. There is just too much to be gained, to be opened up, in the new virtual world. But let’s at least recognize the pain that comes along with the ride.
