HOW TO USE A BOOK
I grew up with books themselves, which impart a physical aspect of knowledge that never leaves you, of choosing, holding and using books, a mind fed by books with the heft of pages turned by hand and dog-eared with book-learning, if you can get that anymore, which seems to be less and less likely the longer I live; you can see it in the oncoming verbiage, so much of which is undergrowth...
That's how it felt when the other day I was wording on the computer, where I now mostly always handle words - workwise, not creativitywise - only now and then eccentrically making notes out in the infrastructural wilds, scribing cursive with pen and ink on paper, like a caveman sparking fire with stones in a cave in winter.
Anyway, I was working via ratatatty keyboard from words written in penbase, when I had to use an online e-thesaurus that had been developed to serve the TLDR mentality that is sponging through young minds of today, so the word that I knew from pen- and-book-based experience, but could not call immediately to mind - a problem Roget also had - was not in the e-thesaurus, even though I scrolled all the way to the bottom of the web page and then left-clicked through all the Nexts.
So at a virtual impasse, leaning backward in real time I reached over the keyboard and my actual desktop to my actual bookshelf, and grabbed my trusty old Roget's. It was heavy with reality, tatty from so many wrestles with meaning over the years , but it was a way of life that my hands knew well: they were old friends, those pages and my fingers, met again and delighting in the encounter, romping together through those magic fields of hard-copy intelligence.
My fingers knew it to the roots, how to leaf at the back, to get to... right... about... there: the Rs, without even looking, the soft, well-used, hand-familiar pages feathering open in that always pleasant way, somewhere near or even at my objective, and I found my word, for it had been a common word, not too long ago, my finger expertly scanning down the long list of nuance to the desired meaning...
My fingers knew it to the roots, how to leaf at the back, to get to... right... about... there: the Rs, without even looking, the soft, well-used, hand-familiar pages feathering open in that always pleasant way, somewhere near or even at my objective, and I found my word, for it had been a common word, not too long ago, my finger expertly scanning down the long list of nuance to the desired meaning...
They really knew and used words when they made this book, and they knew who they were serving; this was before words were handled like allegedly southern-fried alleged chicken allegedly from Kentucky... This was like walking through a meadow of meaning spun from all the mind by the sun of creativity, alive in all ways and as rich with ancient understanding as a wild strawberry...
Then back to the pixel plasma, even more aware of what is waning as we change focus, turn our eyes away...
