A Walker in the Suburbs

Thinking about the books and magazines I grew up with — and the ones my children did, too. Bookcases stuffed full,  nightstands spilling over, newspapers strewn across the kitchen table. My grandfather had a reading stand so he could prop up the paper and scan it as he had breakfast.

Reading is a solitary act with social potential — especially, I think, when the written word is on paper and more easily shared. When kids see their parents reading they are more likely to read themselves. But what happens when the words are on a device, ephemeral and inconstant?

I guess it makes the kids want the device, and this is undeniably true. But how do we measure the effect of the device itself, and the fact that it can be everything — book, magazine, newspaper? How does this change the reading equation?

There are answers here — and one day we will know them.

How Life Unfolds is the name of a new ad campaign waged by the paper industry. I read about it in the newspaper (printed on newsprint — key point) a couple weeks ago.

It’s no secret that I’m a big believer in paper. I write about it occasionally (albeit in electronic posts on this blog!) and use it everyday. I scribble in an unlined paper journal, read actual books, make lists on scratch pads and send mail that requires stamps.

At the office I must periodically make a case to keep the magazine I edit in print. I have a list of arguments. For one thing, people aren’t likely to look for their alumni magazine online, so why go to the trouble of putting it together if no one sees it. Second, ink-on-paper is a durable emissary. It hangs around for years spreading the university’s good will — and sometimes inspiring alumni to write checks and mail them off in the paper envelopes provided for just such a purpose.

All of which may explain why I cringe at the paper industry’s website. “How paper helps you learn.” “Letters from camp are still a treasured tradition.” “Back to school report: How paper gives you a leg up on learning.”

If the paper industry needs a press campaign it must be worse off than I think. And in fact, a Washington Post article tells me that the copy- and writing-paper market has dropped by more than a third.

Maybe paper will go the way of cotton (“the fiber of our lives”) and become an exclusive commodity. This is what I hope for. It’s better than extinction.

One of the most delicious parts of reading — and liking — a new book (Theroux’s The Journal Keeper, which I mentioned on Saturday) is discovering — or in this case remembering — other wonderful books to read.

Theroux mentions Emerson several times in The Journal Keeper so I spent some time last weekend scouring the house for a collection of his essays. One was nowhere to be found. Only a copy of “The American Scholar” in the Norton Anthology.

But this morning I realize that I don’t need a hard copy; I can go online. And there they are, familiar words a balm to my flagging spirit:

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society
of your contemporaries, the connection of events.  …

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can
present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s
cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an
extemporaneous, half possession.  

 Ah yes, I feel better now. Ready to take on the day.

I’m reading Phyllis Theroux’s The Journal Keeper and — as usual when I read a book that stirs my imagination — am marking pages where there are thoughts I want to ponder. Once an English major always an English major, I guess.

Whatever the reason, I often can’t read a book without a pen and paper in hand. When it’s a library book, as this one is, I content myself to mark the pages with little sticky notes. Re-reading some of these marked pages this morning, I came upon this one:

“Rereading an earlier part of my journal, I came across the lines where I say that Emerson chose his life early. I have chosen to be a writer and must be willing to do what it takes. It is like drilling for oil, having the faith that it is down there. But beyond or beneath that faith is the commitment to dig, whether the oil is there or not.”

Once again, I’ve just finished reading a book on Kindle. This little device, which I welcomed with a “be gone from me, Satan” comment when my brother gave it to me one Christmas, has definitely come in handy the last few years. I’ve noticed, however, and have described here, that I can’t seem to remember what I read on the thing!

That will not be the case with The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert. I’ll remember this book even though I’ve never really held it in my hands, even though the length of it was not immediately apparent to me. (I don’t always pay attention to those little percentage marks in the right-hand corner.) I’ll remember it because it’s a big, messy, life-loving novel of a type I don’t read much anymore.

I’ll remember it for eponymous passages like this one:

“the signature of all things”—namely, that God
had hidden clues for humanity’s betterment inside the design of every
flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth. All the natural world was a
divine code, Boehme claimed, containing proof of our Creator’s love.

And for less splashy lines like these:  

Have you ever noticed how the most splendid
lilacs, for instance, are the ones that grow up alongside derelict barns
and abandoned shacks? Sometimes beauty needs a bit of ignoring, to
properly come into being.

I’ll remember it for the character of Alma, a woman who gracefully accepts disappointments and challenges and who at the end of her life says she was fortunate because was able to spend it “in study of the world. As such, I have never felt
insignificant. This life is a mystery, yes, and it is often a trial, but
if one can find some facts within it, one should always do so — for
knowledge is the most precious of all commodities.”

Like all good books, this one left me feeling closer to the heart of things. It left me feeling more alive.

The Nobel Prize-winning author Gunter Grass died in Germany on April 13. His obituaries note the profundity of his novels as well as the shameful secret he carried into his late seventies: that Grass, the moralist who scolded Germany for its Nazi past, was himself a member of the SS.

Years ago I read The Tin Drum, which hardly makes me an expert on the author or his work. I write this post only to mention a comment (quoted below) that I read in his Washington Post obituary — that whether you praise or condemn Gunter Grass, his secret past may well have been what inspired his art.

“If Grass had not been living with this wretched little skeleton in his closet, he might never have written a word,” journalist Nathan Thornburgh wrote in Time magazine in 2006. “Instead a haunted Grass cranked out a series of brutal novels about the war [that] helped his entire country stave off collective amnesia for decades.”

Such is the power of art to wound, to salve, to ignite, to free.