Robin Jeffrey Author

Books Connect the Human Race (Part 2 of 2)

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Nevertheless there must be something more to the book mystery. Why not just go out and travel the world if discovery and experience are so important to you? Another dimension of the allure of the published word is the effort involved in reading and the lust for cognizant activity.

The act of reading is an act of learning. Every time an eye peruses a page of written text, the brain whips into action; picking out unknown words, new ways of speaking, new ideas, etc. It requires concentration and a willingness to struggle with tough concepts. Many people who reject the hobby of reading complain that it is “too much work”—that they can receive the experience encased in the syntax and diction through much easier means. These people are Walker Percy’s proverbial consumers. “The consumer is content to receive an experience just as it has been presented to him by theorists and planners” (Percy). Media outside of the written word are little more than presentations. There is barely room for thinking outside of the context of the film or webpage. In fact, it is discouraged by other consumers. “Don’t read too much into it” is a phrase bandied about freely.

This is where the ‘readers’ have discovered something different about books. In processing the words privately, without outside influence and the freedom to find meaning wherever they want, they step into the role of Percy’s sovereign knower. “…a sovereignty of the knower—instead of being a consumer of a prepared experience, I am a sovereign wayfarer, a wanderer in the neighborhood of being who stumbles into the garden” (Percy). Readers wander through a garden of words and stumble upon truth in places the author may have never intended.

It’s a paradox. With the World Wide Web and mass media, we can look into the lives of people half a world away. Within moments of any disaster, news cameras are rolling, and from the comfort of our living rooms, we are in the thick of it – in the eye of the storm, observing people’s suffering.

Yet, as individuals, we are more separated than ever. Thanks to tools given to us by well-meaning entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and others, we have been isolated. Separated by plastic screens, the human connection is slowly withering. Empathy is a dying emotion.

The world of humanity is growing colder, slowly filling up with silicon chips and wire. Whether we are fully cognizant of this or not, we all encounter it. One can get an entire college degree without ever meeting a teacher or stepping into a classroom; gamble away your money without ever holding a poker chip; mail order a bride for a modest fee.

What do we do to escape this blizzard of a detached existence? We turn away from the constant, faster-than-sound connections, and isolate ourselves physically. Pick up a book. Open it. It’s only in this world of ink and binding that we’re able to grab hold of the emotions that keep us alive. Books have always been, and will continue to be valued in our society because of their ability to individually connect us to the collective consciousness of humanity.

Works Cited

Percy, Walker. “The Loss of the Creature.” The Loss of the Creature. 05 Nov 2007. Henry M. Jackson High School. 5 Nov 2007 <http://www.everett.k12.wa.us/CMS/cmsSites/cmsUserFiles/jacksonhigh/nnicoletta/files/The%20Loss%20of%20the%20Creature.doc>.

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You Ever Dance with the Devil in the Pale Moonlight?

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Frank watched it carefully from behind his bar. The club was empty by this hour, thank goodness. He didn’t want it getting out that he had resorted to this.

A demon.

Frank Delgatto, how low can you go?

Hell, he was desperate. This cop, this Lt. Demming, was closing in, and none of the conventional means of sending him on his way had worked.

It occurred to Frank, as he was pouring a healthy serving of whisky into each glass, that it might not drink.

His eyes moved up to the round, bloody hole that was the things mouth. To be honest, he didn’t want to think about it.

“So,” Frank made his way over to the table as nonchalantly as he could, glasses in hand. “Mr. Mac. You’ve come highly recommended to me.” The glasses hit the table, ice clinking against the crystal. “And I must say, you look as though you’re the right…” Frank struggled briefly with the noun before recovering, “…individual for the job I have in mind.”

Mac said nothing, yellow eyes staring lazily at Frank from behind half-closed lids. It’s hands tapped rhythmically on the table, and it was with a sudden wave of nausea that Frank realized it wasn’t it’s fingernails that were making the clicking noise – it was the teeth.

Frank sat down in the chair, not bothering to pull it closer to the table. “You’ve been in L.A. long, Mr. Mac?”

It’s just Mac. No mister. My price is fifteen grand now, fifteen after.

Frank hadn’t heard it speak. The words just appeared in his consciousness, cold and stark like a sliver of ice slipping into his ear and melting.

He ignored the sudden, sharp headache that typically accompanied unexpected telepathy. The bastard could’ve warned him. “30 g’s.” Frank wiped the condensation off his glass, staring into the eyes of the thing across the table. “Pretty steep for a simple hit.”

Mac said nothing. He moved with a slow deliberateness, cupping a hand over his glass. The bile colored eyes widened, the inner eyelids coming across vertically to keep them moist. Frank scrambled to fill the precariously silent void he had created. “I mean, I’m sure you’re very good at what you do, uh, Mac, but…it’s just some dumb flat foot who doesn’t know how to take a hint.”

Mac adjusted his tie with his free hand, his posture slackening into the visual representation of a sigh.

You want this man dead.

“Yes.” Frank couldn’t stop fidgeting in his seat, shifting and re-shifting.

You want this man to disappear.

“Yes, so?”

You want this man to be completely eradicated, no trace of him left.

“Yes, yes, goddamnit!”

Mac removed his hand from his now empty whisky glass, shaking his hand so as to remove the last few drops of amber liquid.

That’s gonna cost you thirty thousand, Mr. Delgato.

Frank looked from the glass, to Mac, several times.

So that’s what Willy meant when he said this fellow ate cops for breakfast.

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Books Connect the Human Race (Part 1 of 2)

We live in an age where there is a vast multitude of ways to entertain ourselves. Of the hundreds of channels on TV, most run programming twenty-four hours a day. Newspapers are delivered daily to households across the world; the internet never turns off. And of course, there are books. According to the American Library Association, in the United States alone there are over 117,000 libraries. “Since 1776, 22 million titles have been published”, and as of 2004, there were over 2.8 million books in print (Para Publishing).

Why?

What’s the point? In terms of technology (and in this day and age, what isn’t looked at in terms of technology?), books are outdated. An old, slow, difficult way of obtaining information and entertainment that only isolates people from the ‘mainstream’. With the popularity of websites like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, it’s evident that society currently embraces more social forms of amusement than perusing a novel generally provides.

Mobile technology has even increased the reach of more social forms of media. (Picture by Sigfrid Lundberg via Flickr)

What is it about books that continue to capture our attention? It’s clear that the book’s allure has not diminished in this age of technology. Millions of people read the final installment of the Harry Potter series, but refuse to see the movies. What do books provide that none of the countless other media forms can?

When you open a page on the net, your eyes are never the first to see it. It is obvious and expected. When you pay your eight dollars to go see a movie, you’re never alone in the theater. Packed tight into plush seats, the movie is viewed by a group full of strangers simultaneously. It is built for mass consumption. However, when you open the pages of a book, the illusion of discovery is there. Much like Cárdenas (as referred to in Walker Percy’s famous essay), the pages lie open to us—a fresh, untouched discovery. It doesn’t matter that it was published over fifty or a hundred years ago. It is to the reader an unexplored Eden where they are the only inhabitants.

Richard Rodriguez speaks in his autobiography of his first connection with books. “I sat there and sensed for the very first time some possibility of fellowship between a reader and a writer, a communication, never intimate like that I heard spoken words at home convey, but one nonetheless personal” (Rodriguez). Books seem to speak to us and us alone, and we are allowed to make our own decisions about what the stories, the style, and the characters, mean to us.

On the other hand, Rodriguez also demonstrates what many other readers may feel – at least those whose first and most lasting experiences were reading for (and only for) the classroom. “When I read William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, I was immediately pleased by the narrator’s warmth and the charm of his story. But as quickly I became suspicious. A book so enjoyable to read couldn’t be very ‘important.’…I loved the feeling I got after the first hundred pages-of being at home in a fictional world where I knew the names of the characters and cared about what was going to happen to them… I never knew how to take such feelings seriously, however. Nor did I suspect that these experiences could be part of a novel’s meaning” (Rodriguez). How many times have we overheard a student saying that they only like to read books that aren’t “assigned”? Percy might say that they are rebelling against the educational package that the book is presented in. Sensing the fact that the book is not being taught in its true form, the average student shies away from it entirely. For these people, the more connections a book makes to their emotions, the less inclined they will be to enjoy it.

When we sit in a darkened theatre and watch a movie flicker by on the screen, we are cognizant of the crowd. Aware of the fact that at the same exact moment, you are meant to experience the same thing as the stranger next you. The movie is made, not to be pleasing to each of us individually, at our own pace, but to the crowd, the mob of those desperate to be entertained.

The urge to read books could be called a selfish urge. The desire to have a world of people all to ourselves, even if just for an instant. The freedom to find our own meaning when it becomes apparent to us, not when the dramatic music swells to signal the time for an appropriate emotion.

Works Cited

“ALA Library Fact Sheet 1.” ALA: American Library Association. 2007. American Library Association. 1 Nov 2007 <http://www.ala.org/ala/alalibrary/libraryfactsheet/alalibraryfactsheet1.cfm>.

Poytner, Dan. “Statistics.” Para Publishing. 2004. Para Publishing. 1 Nov 2007 .

Rodriguez, Richard. “The Achievement of Desire.” The Achievement of Desire. 05 Nov 2007. Henry M. Jackson High School. 5 Nov 2007 <http://www.everett.k12.wa.us/CMS/cmsSites/cmsUserFiles/jacksonhigh/nnicoletta/files/The%20Achievement%20of%20Desire.doc>.

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Never Too Late

The steaming water burned his tongue, but Kyle sipped at it anyway, enjoying the stinging sensation, and letting it rouse him, if only temporarily, out of his bored stupor. He spent a few minutes focusing on his posture, the next racking his brain to think of any supplies he had yet to order. There must be something he could be doing to earn his paycheck, rather than just sitting there.

He was lucky to have a job, he knew that. Most of his graduating class were still looking, moving back in with their parents, or even, in desperation, going back to school to rack up even more of the debt they couldn’t get a job to pay off in the first place. But the truth of the matter was, Kyle’s brain craved stimulation – and he didn’t know if he could stand one more year of staring at his computer screen, waiting in hope that someone would need something copied.

The thought depressed him. He hated being depressed. With a sigh, he pushed himself away from his desk and headed for the back stairs, pulling his knit cap tight over his ears. He stepped out into the parking lot and was greeted with a sheet of driving rain in the face. Hunching his shoulders, he walked on, past the endless stalls of parked cars and into the undeveloped forest lots behind the building.

Kyle liked this little, ragged patch of nature, stuck in the middle of a dirty office block. It reminded him of the legends of faerie folk and woodland creatures he had studied at school for his thesis. Maybe amidst all this cold and boredom and never-ending sameness, he could still find a touch of magic, if only in his imagination.

When he didn’t return to his desk by check-out time, his colleagues assumed he had decided to play hooky for the rest of the day. When Kyle was still missing by the beginning of the next day’s work, HR called his home phone, his cell, and finally his emergency contact. No one had heard from him since he left his desk the day before. The police came in and made a thorough search of the woods behind the building, but found no trace of him.

People avoided the woods after that. No one would say why out loud, though several of the programmers, when they sat at their desks, waiting for code to compile and bug checks to run, would doodle the small rings of mushrooms the police had found covering almost every inch of the forest floor. No one could remember having seen them before that day Kyle went missing. And sometimes, sometimes they said, whispering over coffee, they thought they heard a man’s laughter echoing through the parking lot, coming from the patch of the woods.

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Move On

Ghosts don’t do much talking as a rule; they’re too self-absorbed. That’s why they walk through walls. They’re too busy dwelling on their own problems to notice that the hotel has been remodeled since they died in it in 1850.

Being a medium can get pretty damn lonely when you get right down to it. It’s like being at a party by yourself. You can see everyone else mingling and drinking the punch, but nobody’ll talk to you. It’s like being invisible.

That’s why I killed myself.

Well, that’s one of the reasons. It wasn’t exactly a hard decision to come to. No family, no job, no place to live; and a whole load of used-to-be-people wandering around in my head who wouldn’t even ask me how I was doing. I figured, if I was dead too, maybe they wouldn’t be so shy. Now I realize it wasn’t shyness; it was goddamn condescension.

Every ghost thinks their story is the most tragic, the most pitiful, that their unfinished business makes them special. It takes a certain kind of personality to become a ghost; a certain neediness, for attention, for love, for justice, and a belief that whatever you want, you’re entitled to it. Pathetic really, hanging around the living, letting them catch glimpses of you just so you won’t be forgotten. The world moves on and we should too. We got the time we had and to expect more is just selfish. Leave life to the living. I’m not sure what’s behind that misty light that I sometimes see in the sky, but I can almost guarantee it’s more exciting than moaning about what should have been.

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Books Connect the Human Race (Part 2 of 2)

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You Ever Dance with the Devil in the Pale Moonlight?

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Books Connect the Human Race (Part 1 of 2)

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Never Too Late

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Move On

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