Paperback Books

Jan 4 2020

When we were boys

my big brother

older by 5 whole years

felt remote, Olympian, unattainable.

5 years,

such a vast difference for a child

that it felt generational.

So he remained mysterious, a detached figure,

our lives intersecting

only at dinner

and festive family meals.

Otherwise, we might as well have been strangers;

he, indifferent,

and I, a little overawed.

In his dark imperial bedroom

he had shelves stuffed with paperbacks,

soft-covered books

I was strictly forbidden to touch.

Pulp fiction, I'd imagine

a stash of trashy novels

some classics, as well;

but as meticulously kept

as rare first editions

in some Bodleian Library vault.

Now, over 50 years later

5 years doesn't seem that much.

And those precious books

are either consigned to some mouldering dump

or have become unreadable,

paper brittle

spines cracked

covers badly scuffed.

Artifacts of an age

before cloud-based readers,

when cheap books

were guarded like family heirlooms,

and younger brothers rarely seen

almost never heard.

Back when things had heft, and permanence

    —   real objects

you held in your hands   —

and it was relationships that were virtual.

Siblings

who now live faraway

leading very separate lives.

When 5 years

has come to seem so little,

yet the distance seems no less.

Beside my laptop sits an old Roget's thesaurus: 5^th edition, scuffed cover, broken spine. I actually never open it anymore, and it acts more as a paperweight than a reference. After all, every word can now be Googled, so why pick up a book?

Anyway, it caught my eye as I sat down to write, and immediately drew me back to that long ago bookshelf in my older brother's bedroom, a place that was always dark and stuffy and enticingly mysterious. I thought about that bookcase of valued paperbacks, and how foolish it was to invest in trying to preserve such disposable and poorly made objects. How attached we get to things; how we waste energy on ultimately pointless pursuits; how time transforms our values and priorities.

I realized, also, that while the temporal distance between me and my older brother has largely disappeared, there is still a distance: not in the sense of hostility or alienation, but rather a feeling of formality, a lack of intimacy. And a difference that is exacerbated, now, by political and ideological ones.

They still make paperbacks, of course. But they are not what they were when they first came out: cheap reading for the masses, a kind of revolutionary democratization of literature I'm tempted to compare (but really shouldn't) to Gutenberg's movable type.

And also an early example of obsolescence. Shoddy things, designed to be disposable. The stuff churned out by an economic system that is an engine of waste; that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.