MAUREEN MULLARKEY

GUTENBERG ELEGIES

Information is a tool but love of reading is a way of life. Like any love, it has a physical dimension; there is more to it than simply ingesting print. It begins with pleasure in the look, feel and weight of a book. Even the smell of books carries a certain enchantment. Old ones in particular, redolent with history, prod us to imagine a world without us in it, the world our children will inherit. They tilt our attention toward the future by reminding us that the present passes, in poet Josph Brodsky's phrase, “at the speed of a turning page.”

Digital literacy, that darling of techno-utopians, competes now with physical books and the solitary, contemplative print culture nourished by them. Champions of screen reading predict that the paper book-an instrument of modernity-might not be around much longer. Consider, then, the contrasting possibility that in this digital age, books and book arts matter more than ever before.

In our post-Gutenberg world, communication is increasingly disembodied. it flickers across a screen, fugitive and insubstantial. We inhabit an impatient culture, distracted by technologies that advance convenience and facilitate the hunt for information. Techno-readers can carry entire libraries in their pockets. But it is not the the gadgetry that ripens the reader or enriches his life; It is the word itself.

Surely words mattered more when, to write them, they had to be inscribed in moist clay and set out to dry. Or when the writer had to choose and sharpen his own quill and grind his own ink. For that reason, old handwriting-shards of letters, ledgers, diaries, music manuscripts, anything with the mark of a hand-earns its place among the arts. It is a practical one, certainly, but an art nonetheless. And the first experience with disciplined drawing for generations who came of age without a keyboard.

“Read in order to live,” wrote Flaubert, recognizing the umbilical relation between reading and a life well lived. Artifacts gathered from the tangible history of thought, these bookwork collages are meant as metaphors for the experience of reading and the fragility of cultural memory.

Maureen Mullarkey
2009