Pocket-worlds

I often wonder who I would be without the pocket-worlds I have inhabited throughout the course of my life. The unreading life is one I can barely imagine and if truth be told, shudder at. I know there are societies where literacy is not a needful or valued cultural skill. Yet, in this cultural reality, the one in which I live, a world where the tradition of reading is not cultivated and nurtured seems cruel, sad, barren and terribly narrow.

Now, I do know that the arrival of the printing press and the dispersal of reading set in motion some of the epochs most barbaric episodes and still does. Some literary traditions' fearmongering is subtle. Ever notice how in most epic fantasy series the bad guys are the products of miscegenation, have interesting skin tones or live nomadic lives in the desert. One doesn't need to be overly worldly to get the operation of alterity going on there. So yea, books have as much potential to close down the world or reiterate its ugliness as to open them.

And yet ... I would read all the ugly necessary for those moments when the world crafted by an other allows me to transcend my corporeality, the banality of my everyday routines, the narrowness of my thinking. Yea, barring the experience of the sublime, I would just read for the connection (as false as that intimacy might be) to the world of another. To cry with them, laugh those crazy giggles with them, to shudder with discomfort with them, to just feel the human condition with them.

Some books are at the centre of ritual and traditions. I'm sure you have heard of the Torah, the Bible or the Quran. Or how about Dianetics? These books no longer inhabit the realm of the ordinary text, their sacrality is maintained through time-worn rituals which every generation reinterprets for their own needs.

I think of academics as professional readers with their own traditions of reading, their own ways of valorising certain texts and their own way of waving certain magical texts to silence an other. Being an academic, even as one strives to uphold the tradition of being innovative, is to be deeply bound by tradition. We even get the  rituals with the gowns and strange hats when we have read a significant amount of things to signify our moving through our stages. There are titles to go with different levels of demonstrable reading and writing the texts for others to read. In the disciplines one is not really fully a member of that society if one hasn't become familiar with the writing of some of the significant ancestors. There are some things we just do, because it has always been done that way. When we write for others to read, it has become traditional to acknowledge who we read. Failure to do so is a punishable act. Our traditional ways are understood by outsiders and we can even get the law and media to help us vilify and sanction our transgressors.  

Do you remember when more people would lick their finger to turn the page? Now of course, in our more sanitised world, it is kinda gross. Well, if you're a licker, I'm sorry, that is a tradition you need to stop, right now! Or how about reading and trying to keep the pages pristine? I don't anymore, I follow a different tradition now. You know, the one where you leave your conversation with the author inked on the pages. You might know some people who follow the new post-it traditions or perhaps the yellow or green highlighter ones. Or perhaps, you still prefer quieter, less insistent conversations with your favorite books.

Anyway, books are pocket-worlds: little worlds that can be transported in your pocket. Even though ones relations with pocket-worlds are idiosycratic and bound by traditions, life without them would be to tragically miss too many journeys.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)