What's So Special About Books, Anyway?

As always, Carl Sagan said it better than anyone. Watch for about 60 seconds.

Here’s the transcription of what he says:

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic, and this room is full of magic.

This quote has got me thinking about more than one topic for a post, but today we’re going to focus on one part:

Inside the Mind of Another Person

You are, unfortunately, stuck inside your own head. Everything you perceive, every sight you see, sound you hear, smell you, um, smell, is synthesized into conscious experience (qualia for you philosophy of mind nerds) inside your head. Everybody speaking to you is speaking inside your head, because that is where your sense of hearing is processed and experienced. But it doesn’t feel like that. Our brain is very good at this job, and our sensory experiences feel like they are located outside of us. They feel like they are located where the physical stimuli that prompted them are. Our sense of space locates colors and sounds into a (mostly) coherent three-dimensional world around us, a model we can verify with our limbs and tools if we need to. We hear a mosquito buzzing around our ears, and we swat it against our neck. This is “inside our head” in the sense that if we didn’t have a head it wouldn’t be happening at all, but it doesn’t feel like it’s inside our head.

Reading, seemingly uniquely among anything we can do with our brains, does feel like it is happening inside our heads. The letters on the page exist outside; the visual experience of seeing them is like any other visual experience; but the meaning of those letters, of the words and sentences they become, is assembled and comes to life inside us. We feel the inside-ness of it.

Last weekend, at the Rewind Book Fair, I was indeed lucky enough to meet Peter S. Beagle, and he signed my copy of I See By My Outfit. It was a lovely moment, but that interaction, necessarily short and superficial in the loud, cold, crowded building where it took place, felt much less like “meeting” him than did reading his own words the week before. We shook hands and smiled, I gave him a button with his name on it (taken from his preface to a deceased copy of The Fellowship of the Ring), he signed my book, and graciously—dare I said, interestedly—answered a question I asked him about it, and I hurried back to my table, which I had boldly left unattended. But as in any meeting between two human beings, we were separate as well as together: by a folding table, by the material of his skeleton-hand winter gloves, by fifty years, by the fleshy prisons that keep our insides safe from worms and sunlight and other peoples’ souls.

But when I read his book, those barriers were nowhere to be seen. The years between us were evident only in the datedness of some of his references (the book was published in 1965, and Beagle recognizes that he must explain to his audience what exactly The Lord of the Rings is). My body was used only to turn the pages and see each one’s surface; his had been used to press the keys on a typewriter in the distant past, a process which need never be repeated by him or anyone else. These simple tasks notwithstanding, the process is primarily intimate and mental; I conjure his words into my own mind, and I feel their ideas against the ideas I keep there already. There is nothing like this in the physical world. There seems to be no intermediary between his mind and mine.

Of course, this isn’t true. Language is a brillaint innovation, undoubtedly humanity’s most valuable evolutionary novelty and the basis for nearly everything that has ever saved a life or moved a heart, but it is not a perfect medium of transmission, for nothing is. As a writer, Beagle would be the first to acknowledge that you can’t always write what you mean, that sometimes what you put on the paper has shockingly little to do with what you had in your mind when you put it there, and as a reader we cannot always hope to find in those words what was hidden there. We interpret things in our own way, and despite any efforts we might take to meet the author where we find them, we cannot hope to have a perfect understanding. We cannot even perfectly understand ourselves, let alone other people.

But importantly, regardless of whether it is true or not—and for all that I just said, I think it is a bit true—that is what reading feels like. Every movie we see, every song we hear, every conversation we have, feels like foreign entity we must contend with, an exotic organism to be inspected, weighed, measured, prodded, pet, and perhaps hunted down or chased away. But not so what we read—what we read comes from our own thought, we hear it in our own voice (metaphorically speaking or otherwise). If what we read pleases us, we feel the gratification that the person who wrote these words really has felt something we have felt; if it disturbs, we shudder that someone else could have made us think such alien thoughts. To read is to open yourself to the experience of another person, to make that experience—in some small way, at least–your own.

Much is made these days of empathy, or the lack of it, or the purported overrating of it. Much ink and not a little blood has been spilled in its defense or in its abjuration. I will out myself as a staunch defender of empathy, as the foundation of all but the most self-serving moral frameworks, and as the lubrication on which the many gears and axles of our pluralistic society run. Paul Bloom’s silly argument against empathy is that is a rare experience—you might have empathy for someone if you have already experienced something very like what they are going through, or you might be able to sit in a blank room for a spell and imagine up the experience for yourself. To me this suggests Paul Bloom has been reading textbooks for too long. It is true that empathy, by itself, is not everything, not close to enough. If you want to be in community with your neighbors you must, I am sorry to say, talk to them, live with them, eat with them, and fight for them. But if you want to feel for them, and you don’t want to sit around in a blank room, then I think you have to read.