To Read Again

I look back fondly at my years in high school and college, before my intellect and attention span collapsed under the NWO of the digital revolution. As my dad described the younger me when he and my mom were over for dinner last week, "you were always doing something. You could never sit still." That's true, for the most part. The one thing I did sit still for, however, was reading. 

I have fond memories of books; I loved to read. Like my first bicycle, it really was a passport to other worlds. I would always have a paperback in my back pocket of backpack, usually accompanied by a small notebook where I would take notes and jot down ideas from what I was reading. Fiction and nonfiction, poetry...I didn't discriminate. I appreciated the texture of yellowed pages and bumpy typeset, the musty smell that came from used copies with a history of passing hands down through the years, random dog-eared pages and faint pencil underlines. 

I read Stephen King's 1,153 page apocalyptic novel The Stand when I was in 6th grade. I remember taking my dad's copy of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf on a Greyound bus to Maine and finding an Amtrak ticket stub from 1971 as a bookmark. Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray I would read on solemn winter days from a clapboard room I rented on Union Street in Doylestown. I ripped a copy of Thoreau's Walden in half, taking half with me to read on the Appalachian Trail and mailing the second half to a PO Box somewhere up the way in Duncannon. I treated my turquoise copy of Volume 4 of the ancient eastern book of ascetic wisdom, The Philokalia, with a reverence, as if it contained mighty powers of transformation. And it did. My library copy of Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums came with me everywhere I went in high school. I read it six or seven times before buying my own copy at City Lights in San Francisco years later in my twenties, breaking the binding over a coffee and brandy at Vesuvio in North Beach.  It was Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov that marked my travels wondering the South Island of New Zealand, light filtering through the curtains of the shed I lived in on a horse farm.  Camus' The Stranger. To name a few.

I haven't read a legit novel in years. The thought of sitting down to revisit Tolstoy's War and Peace is a foreign concept, unimaginable today. These days I consume information. I scarf up bites and while it rarely gives me indigestion, it is not broken down. I do not savor. I do not sit back and chew 30 times before each swallow. I move from one course to the next in sequence, from multiple plates before me. I visit blog whorehouses for thirty second satiation session, burp, and move on to the next window. Nuance is lost on me. Anything too complex is glossed over. Don't ask too much of me. I don't invest in characters and plot. I simply distractedly swallow things whole before it disappears in the ether of a virtual feed.

It's a sacramental past I will never get back, and that the young adults of the digital age of today will never know. Cranky, I know. I really do mourn the loss of it though; my attention span, the appreciation for development, the willingness to invest in characters and follow a plot to it's end, choosing pants with back pockets big enough to hold whatever paperback I was reading. Every book (like every cassette tape song back then), had a memory tied to it. They were like cairns left to mark the path to adulthood should I ever wish to revisit. Their physicality was important. I have thrown or given away a lot of books over the years, but some I have kept. They've earned their place on the shelf.