Papercuts or Bust

Check on your friends that don’t have the capacity to handle any additional end-of-year responsibilities.

Not me though. I won’t be bullied into following the imaginary rules of a 10-inch doll.

Speaking of rules, this newsletter doesn’t have any. So we’re switching things up today.

Let’s get into it:

Paperback Princess

Since the birth of e-books in the early 2000s, I’ve stood atop my metaphorical rooftops screaming my preference for paperbound books to anyone who would put down their Kindle long enough to listen. And regardless of how many physical copies remain untouched on my bookshelves, I am committed to this paper-fueled fanfaronade^[1] .

Without my dog-eared pages and pen-filled margins, I might as well just watch the watered down movie adaptations.

Because the permanent marks I’ve left on books are mirror images of the marks they’ve left on me.

But this sentiment extends well beyond literacy. Beyond words scribbled onto shaved pieces of wood. It extends into all facets of life.

There are endless dichotomies that invite similar debate. Analog vs. Digital. Face-to-face vs. Zoom.

But we often fail in recognizing how the progressive leaps that propel us through our day to day lives ultimately contradict themselves. You see, as we make advancements in any one area, we must also make room for that progress by making sacrifices.

Technology is quite subtractive in that way.

As we cut time, corners, and inconveniences out, we sacrifice the whole that’s been greater than the sum of it’s parts all along. And I believe that no matter how far we advance, the tangible, hands on experience is, and always will be, the gold standard.

For that reason, I will always value tangibility over the convenience of technology.

But like I said, this extends well beyond texts. Just this morning I was flipping through^[2] one of my favorite unfinished books and I landed on a page with a sentence underlined in blue ball-point ink:

“Travel by air is not travel at all, but simply a change of location.” 
Broken Vessels, Essays by Andrew Dubus

Dubus references the same phenomenon: tangibility. Not bound by only touch, but something palpable. To experience road maps and red lights and communal radio and bathroom breaks and traffic jams and searching for street signs and the blur of grass blades and mountainsides and crossing state lines and bare feet on dashboards and silence. Silence that you’re free to break through at any moment with “often messy, warts-and-all conversations, with all the “ums,” “likes,” laughs and snorts left in.”

But I know it’s not reasonable to turn my nose up at all of the shortcuts and productivity that technology allows me^[3] . I know it’s not logical to function with only pen and paper and walking and in-person exchanges.

So if there’s one thing that I can hold on to, it’s my books. My real life, space hogging, dog-eared, sometimes ignored, paperback experiences.

I won’t sacrifice that.

^{[1] Did I make you google a new word?
[2] Something I’d never have accomplished via Kindle or audiobook.
[3] She says in her digitized newsletter projected through a phone screen.}

until next time. -cd