When was the last time you saw wind?
You’re probably picturing tree branches writhing in an aimless breeze, or long grass flattening to the ground as clouds float overhead in the same direction. You may be thinking of a violent gust that destroys your hairstyle (and perhaps plasters it to your lip gloss), or autumn leaves floating down a suburban sidewalk.
In none of these scenarios do we actually see wind itself, however. We see the results of it, the effect it has on the more tangible things in our world, but not the force itself.
When someone endeavors to write a book – works of fiction in particular, I should say – they are attempting to carry their ideas over the threshold of tangibility. There is a complete world in the author’s mind, a separate universe that no one will ever know about unless the writer allows them to. There are people, planned and understood down to the most minute of details – birthdate, zodiac sign, inconsequential birthmarks – and loved so deeply that their creator must stop and remind themselves “Oh, these people aren’t real.” But no one else will ever love them, nor even know them, unless the author permits it.
Without the dedication and tenacity of the author, the world they have created and the inhabitants of it will never be known to anyone but themselves. Even if the ideas are embodied in text, the results can be unsettling. Once the elation of having completed such an arduous task fades, the author is left with the realization that their ideas, their beloved characters, their entire universe can be condensed into a mere string of oh so many words. The days, weeks, months, or years of hard work and emotional turmoil have given birth only to a file so small that it accounts for just an infinitesimal amount of a hard drive, a grain of sand on a sprawling beach.
Printing it out helps. With the click of a button, the book is pulled out of the technological ether and given a solid form. It can at last be held in your hands rather than just your heart. At first, there is relief in this, and a sense of accomplishment – but soon, the writer will realize that their hard work still, at best, fits into a stack of papers no more than two inches thick. The size of it is cruel – it belies the scope, the importance, of the words it contains.
But, however paltry the magnitude of a printed work may be, it still offers some solace. It is the proof of hard work, the evidence of a difficult task completed – it is the portal through which the imagined world can achieve reality.
And this, I think, is why the e-book revolution is being met with opposition and sadness. The demand for paper books is decreasing, and our precious works are more and more often condemned to stay in the very ether from which they came. The frequency with which our stories will be granted a tangible form will decrease until the practice is unheard of. No ink, no paper, no special editions to decorate our shelves. All that will be left are the stories themselves.
But the stories are all that we ever truly needed. You cannot see the characters. You cannot live in the world formed in your mind’s eye – but they are perfectly tangible nonetheless. Just like we cannot see the wind, only the effects of it, we can see the effect of a story. We feel what the characters feel and puzzle over the meaning of the narrative, just as the blades of a windmill turn.
Books do not need to be validated by paper binding. It does not mater what conduit is used to bridge the gap between our world and the world of fiction, as long as that bridge is crossed. The proof of a story’s significance has never lied in the number of pages it occupies. It has always, instead, dwelt in the effect it has on a reader. Everything else is an illusion, that, in this day and age, serves little purpose other than to ease the writer’s insecurities.
Caron Conley 