Book as Sacrament

I grow increasingly tired of incorporeal worship. Scripture and music are good, and all — of course they are; would I be a church musician if I didn't think church music was important? — but I don't get much out of a church service without sacrament. I almost added "and without ritual", there, but of course a sacrament is by its nature an act of ritual. The really sustaining thing about sacrament is the thrill of the tangible — and I use the word here according to its root: tangere, "to touch". It is remarkable that we should be made aware of God's mercies by means of things as simple as water, bread and wine. It helps remind us that we cannot dwell entirely within abstractions; that is to say, it goes some way towards rescuïng us from gnosticism.

It is for similar reasons that I cannot abide e-books (among other e- things; I grudgingly use e-mail, but that completes the list of e-nouns and e-verbs I employ. No doubt some wag will point out the irony that I am writing this on a web-log. My only response is to sigh). The experience of reading a book is a tangible pleasure. Bibliophiles will tell you how pleasant is the crispness of new pages, the smell of the ink, the heft of a weighty tome in one's hands. These things I could take or leave, but they are certainly preferable to the antiseptic experience of staring at a screen.

More important is the notion of book ownership, something that is only possible so long as books remain physical items and not a series of zeroes and ones in a hard drive. (Indeed, the notion of ownership is an ephemeral one on this series of tubes: when we are dead, who shall inherit the mp3 files that replaced our records? The Word documents that replaced our manuscripts? Those jpegs that have replaced our family albums?) I am a habitué of used-book shops, so perhaps I am more aware than some that a book ought to outlast its reader. Moreover, it is an gratifying experience to be lent a book, or, better (though indeed, worse), to inherit one. The book becomes more than an object: it is the signifier of a bond between us and those who have shared with us this collection of characters, locations, ideas. If the secondhand book has annotations in someone else's handwriting, so much the better. The tangible object that points us to a greater reality: that is what we are truly losing if we switch to e-readers.