The Unbeatable Technology of Physical Books
And how to reclaim presence through written observation
Writing from direct observation
I write as a means of living more fully.
Writing for me is also a way of paying attention or observing, a way of objectifying how I am aware of my inner experience and what I perceive in my physical environment. When I write, it brings my attention to subject and object, to myself and what I observe; it draws attention to how I see what I see.
This is particularly true when writing in a plain style. A plain style strives for the straight truth.
Go out into a big social gathering and pay attention. Participate, be an active member, and recall later as much as you can. Go on a hike through someplace foreign to you and set foot where perhaps no one in the history of humankind has ever set foot and recall later as much as you can about everything.
The process enlarges my ability to be present. The process aims to intentionally bring more awareness—open-ended awareness, the desire to perceive with no agenda or judgment—then, later, to recall as much as possible. I try in this writing to be simple and direct and to tell the truth of my experience.
You can do the same with dreams. When you wake, write down what you recall. The act of keeping a dream journal is an aid to recalling your dreams more vividly. I don't know why this is the case, whether it is a function of mind or memory or something more subtle. But it works, and it applies just as well to things that we actually do.
I believe everyone would find value in keeping a regular journal. I always keep a few journals going. A journal can be theme-based or simply a regular thing you do at the end of each day.
Describe your day. At the end of the day, write what happened.
This is a way to track your progress with different projects and how you are feeling and what occupies your attention outside those central activities.
When I look back at old journals, I find more than what I realized I was putting into them.
Simple truthtelling—unornate writing—writing that does not attempt to persuade the reader to feel differently than they wish—carries more than the writer knows. Direct writing is a thing to be trusted.
Physical books
I have been reading Hemingway, so I decided to write this post in a more direct style. When I write like this, it taps into a whole other side of my psyche. Writing comes very easily to the direct voice.
A Moveable Feast is a wonderful read. In it, Hemingway gave his experience of Paris in the 1920s as he was getting started as a writer. Paris at that time was affordable and seems to have been the perfect hub for artists to work, collaborate, share ideas, and be inspired. I would like to live in Paris in the 1920's!
Generally, I listen to books rather than read them, having over time convinced myself that it is a better use of my time if I read while I do other things—take a walk or work on the pottery wheel.
I got back into the groove of reading physical books when I had the inkling to reread some of my favorite sci fi books from childhood, books by an author named William Sleator. His books are not available on audiobook, and only a few (not the best in my opinion) are available on kindle. So I needed to order hard copies.
What fantastic technology physical books are! Unbeatable.
I guess it's common knowledge that reading comprehension is better with physical books compared to reading on a screen, but I don't think it's really understood why that is the case.
Well, I'll tell you. Books are tactile! We're bodied creatures! Tactility matters. End of story, and the beginning of something to marvel at.
Prior to reading A Moveable Feast I read a Interstellar Pig and Strange Attractors by William Sleator, introduced to me as with many good things by my brother David, who is four years older and so I benefited throughout childhood from his generosity and his desire to share. David is a very generous and caring person who is also brilliant. Some people just walk around the world that way. And we are all better for it.
William Sleator was an excellent writer of young adult science fiction. I read these books again and admired his ability to weave yarns and keep me anticipating what will come next. I'm not a natural at that type of writing. Some writers are naturally skilled at misdirection and complex plots. Good for them. They have that going for them, which means they struggle with something else, perhaps something that I have mastered. Good for me.
Today, things happen online
The unbeatability of the physical book is a prime example of how technology improving doesn't linearly improve everything. It creates new options, sometimes better ones, sometimes merely different ones.
Writing exists and has existed for awhile. We are not monks scratching on lambskin. We're not painting pictograms on the wall.
New forms of art are getting created more rapidly than any of us can account for. Yet a person can also get by playing classical cello or tap dancing. It's cause to wonder about how the old can coexist with the new, and yet still be fresh. I am happy to be sharing this on substack. But physical books are better.
Is there a Paris in the 1920's available today? If so, where? Someone might say that it is online, on some platform. And I concede that this is more or less where things happen—we only consider a relationship official when it manifests in a person's social media status. It's also sort of untrue to believe that anything really happens online.
We have a little bistro table on our front porch. When the weather is nice, I eat my meals out there. Sunday mornings, Gina and I have bacon and eggs for breakfast. We live in a neighborhood that gets a lot of pedestrian traffic, and it's Austin, so there are a lot of dogs. This morning, a woman walked by with her dog. It was a woman walking her dog as anyone might walk their dog. A chocolate lab walked slightly before her, immensely interested in everything, sniffing the early morning air—the smell of the pond across the street, the damp smells of the nighttime earth lingering before the day's sunshine has a chance to burn them off. This is also very much how it feels to wake up—there's a crispness to the attention at first light, but also a lethargy, a fog to the metabolism, the rest of the body showing its inertia.
The woman with the dog had a phone a few inches in front of her face as she walked.
The audio played something. A music video or something. That was her reality, center focus on a small screen. Simulacra of western civilization that these small screens are lauded as advanced technology. They are not. They are gizmos.
Despite herself, she was practicing peripheral awareness and disregarding the whole of her current physical environment. I get grumpy about phones, but so what if it was a phone? Couldn’t it have been a book? And don't most of us walk around not perceiving our environment because we are in an insulating bubble of occupying thoughts?
Yes, but that it was a phone made the insulation more pervasive. Compared to a Youtube video, a thought would more easily shift upon peripherally seeing the flash of a duck's wings as it came to a landing in the water.
Online, nothing happens
Because we live less connected to our bodies, we resign ourselves to stimulation that merely hooks our attention and gets us to react. Because the mind cannot feel we are drawn to reactive media as a stand-in for embodied or actual interpersonal options. In the language sense, it's like living in sentence fragments, an abundance of verbs and adjectives.
So although the practice of writing will probably someday be superseded by some technological advancement, for me it's an essential way to reflect on how I bring attention to my life.
This is a concern more upstream than most other reasons why I write. More important than the fact that it is writing is the discipline of it, and the relationship that gets formed within myself that I do it. This is probably true of any artist with any craft.
When people talk about mastery as something to aspire to, it's not only because it allows you to compete at a higher level, because competition is merely one means of practicing. I think it's parallel to how I have heard that all religious leaders or gurus can get along with each other.
Different traditions are different, and we'd muddy the water by saying they're all the same once you get good enough. But a master of one would not fight with a master of another. After mastery, there’s just too much to discover.
In the Zen tradition, for example, there is some fantastic writing that came about through the meeting of a Zen master and a military leader, a master of swordsmanship, which you can read in books like The Unfettered Mind and The Life-Giving Sword.
The sword that kills is the sword that gives life.
- Yagyū Munenori
I’ll leave it at that for the time being.
Creative discipline cultivates self-knowing
It interests me to experience different registers of my voice and to cultivate familiarity with them because doing this brings about a sense of knowing my inner characters, seeing the lenses of the psyche.
If the self and consciousness can be thought of as a ray of sunlight, different circumstances and styles have an effect like sending light through a prism, and these varied rays of self can be encountered and made familiar by working intentionally in different styles and registers of voice.