Textual Pleasures
by Sylvano Lucchetti - 2009-08-31 00:00:00
Every so often, the bells and whistles of the graphical user interface are painful to deal with and I find myself back in the realm of the terminal window, using a text editor, watching the silence of the screen and taking the time to think.
It's pleasant.
This article, for example, I decided to write on a whim and it was written using vim, which is one of the four basic text editor options offered via the text based web browser, w3m, which I am using to access and update this very blog you are reading.
As I stop and think about my topic, I hear the howls of the wind outside and
imagine many odd things. All the while, it is simply this text here that I see.
Ironically, you are probably reading this text in your graphical browser environment that kindly renders the CSS that I have supplied, Google ads and all.
Text is good.
I believe that some people find it difficult to read online simply because there are too many distractions. The visual litter hurts their brains. It also denigrates the value of the text. Think how printed texts from years gone by seemed to get away with bold, italics and underline styles only. These three simple typographical enhancements in combination with the regular characters of punctuation are capable of leading the reader along any narrative path possible.
In fact, the novels of today pretty much still do just that.
Marvel at anyone laying on the sofa flipping pages of uniform blocks of text, totally engrossed, being swept along by someone else's fictional drama. All the while, the reader is flipping pages, mesmerised and oblivious all else.
The turning of the page is no more than the drawing of a mental breath by a person on a mental marathon.
This is another drawback of online reading, I suspect. The action of scrolling a screen of rendered content is too closely aligned with the skimming action one uses looking through a reference book and is inconsistent with the commitment of being a reader. There is not quite the same rhythmical meter to reading online.
Did I mentioned commitment?
You see, the willingness to pick up a book and then to focus upon the singular visions of a particular author is a decision like no other. It is a relationship. And hey, sometimes you are just not in the mood. In fact, to persist when you do not want to persist is the hardest work of all. But when the fires of passion are burning, then a whole afternoon, a whole day, indeed, a whole weekend can pass before the spell wears off.
And like a relationship, it can end.
How often it is that you walk past a shelf and feel the pangs as you try to ignore the fact that you will not picking up that book ever again. The love isn't there and it never will be. But you can't quite bring yourself to sell it, to give it away or to start a fire with it. On the other hand, some books bring you to a state of hate so intense that you unhesitatingly throw it to the floor and curse it with the most damning of curses, before lunging it into any direction away from yourself, hurling extra curses in its wake just for good measure.
You mumble to the author - in theatre of your own mind - how lucky they are that you don't know where they live, because if you did, you would almost certainly be compelled to write them a very angry letter describing exactly how you feel about their worthless piece of crap.
But a relationship with a book you love also ends.
Finishing a book you enjoy for the first time is a mini death. It's a farewell to a lover that is about to embark on a long voyage overseas. Sure, you may well see them again, but you are not quite sure when and you are not quite sure if it will be the same.
People change, books change.
Simply having had that relationship has changed you...