A BOOK IS A PLACE

Joe Meno

 

 

 

 

 

A girl was reading Franny and Zooey. Or maybe it was Nine Stories. The important thing is that the girl was a girl I had fallen badly for, and the book was lying on the floor of her dorm room, and after I had made my intentions known, and she reciprocated, and I reciprocated, and we reciprocated ourselves right out of our clothes, I saw the small white book sitting on the floor and picked it up as she ran off to the bathroom, bare knees buckled together, to wash off the least important part of me. While she was gone, I began reading, and then she returned and began to get dressed and said she had to go class, but asked if I wanted to stay, and I said, all right and so I kept on reading. I read all afternoon in this girl’s bed whom I hardly knew, turning the pages, enjoying the sour milk smell of the girl’s sheets, the glorious perfume of her faint sweat and shampoo and toothpaste. And there was something about reading that book, in that particular room, at that particular time in my life that made an inimitable impression on my life. When I was finished, it was dark outside and I went out into the dark and wandered around, stumbling, reaching out to touch the leaves on the trees, the petals of flowers, an iron fence, and for the first time in my life, I was struck dumb by a profoundly serious sort of wonder, which, in the end, is the exact same thing as falling in love.

And there have been other moments like that one: in airports and bus stations and various waiting rooms, clinics, at the DMV, on buses or subway cars or the backseats of vehicles, or in many different beds, or once in a motel room tub, reading a copy of Donald Barthleme’s Forty Stories and having that electric shock of recognition only a great short story can deliver, feeling embarrassed for having never read such a great writer until that moment. Or sitting on the seventh floor of the Harold Washington Public Library as an art student, pretending to read Naked Lunch, hating it, hoping someone, anyone would notice and be impressed, or in a hospital room, holding my breath, waiting for my daughter to wake up only a few hours after she was born, not wanting to make a noise, too tired, too excited to sleep, watching her lying there—swaddled tight, pink cap atop her head—and flipping through a book entitled Breastfeeding: A Guide, searching among the pages for some clue, some answer, something to keep me from feeling like I was only pretending to be a father now. X-Men #112, which my typically stoic father bought for me during a rough bout of strep throat, which I read in a fort I had built of pillows and sheets in our mold-smelling basement, and the fact that my father bought it for me made me wonder if maybe I was dying, and being seven or eight years old and having never read a comic book before, I paged through it carefully, ignoring my cough, trying to understand what was happening, feeling like some other world had suddenly revealed itself to me.

There are so many more moments, and although all these books have touched me in similar ways since, what I’ve come to acknowledge or slowly accept is that the idea of the book is more important than the actual form it takes—the message, the content being more vital than the medium—and that throughout the history of narrative arts, storytelling has always adapted to these changing forms and technologies, and has managed to not only survive, but begin anew each time, introducing a whole other generation to the possibilities of reading. The Kindle, the iPad, these are just variations of a need we have as a civilization, as a species, to use our imagination, and this need is as important in this time as any other.

For me, a book, in whatever form it takes—hardbound copy, paperback, electronic version, online instrument, text downloaded on a cell phone, even a story read orally—a book is actually a place, a place where we, as adults, still have the chance to engage in active imagining, translating word to image, connecting these images to memories, dreams, and larger ideas. Television, film, even the stage play, have already been imagined for us, but the book, in whatever form we choose to interact with it, forces us to complete it. Television, film, and stage plays do not need us; they exist in completion whether we interact with them or not. But a book, a novel, a short story, even a comic book, needs us to complete the action, to see using our mind’s eye, which gets less use the older we get, the farther we step from childhood games of make-believe. The fact that books provide us the place to imagine is critically important, as it is there, in the imagination, that all sense of possibility rests. The idea of books—what is a book, and what isn’t—is one of the most interesting questions in the world to me, because there isn’t an answer, and by simply trying to find one, an entire world of imaginative possibilities reveals itself to us.