I think I said here somewhere that I have recently returned to reading actual printed books. And I am SO glad I did!

Books that I get from the local public library, perusing their many shelves of new releases, and leaning usually, toward books that combine the personal with the historical: either autobiographical, where the author tells his or her own story within a certain historical context, or biographical, where a seasoned author tells the contextualized life story of someone they likely deeply admire.

I’m shocked to recognize how my inner life is mutating now that I’m reading one of these books daily for at least one hour, and usually two. It’s as if I’ve re-entered a much richer, deeper understanding, resonant with history, and how what human beings do on this planet, is repeat, repeat, repeat!

I don’t even have to force myself to read printed books! I thought I would have to force myself, so much has my usual focus been fractured into a zillion fissioning bits flying into space.

Somehow, to help ground — not my body (I do that daily, with two full hours of “physical culture”) but my mind! — I needed the ability to concentrate on the larger, longer, much more textured and resonant reality of a printed book; and, voila! Once I made the decision to develop this ability, it turned out I didn’t need to develop it! I just needed to ask my brain to remember it! To remember this old old way of concentrating within 3D reality. This old way that I learned as a child, and kept alive, easily, until computers took over, for me, back in the mid-1980s.

Of course I was happy I got that old used Apple 2E computer; it meant that ideas, which for this very fiery double-Sagittarian soul, fly through like lightning, could actually, finally, flow through my fingers unimpeded. I’m still extraordinarily grateful for this technology, for this reason, for me.

But let’s get up to date. Let’s realize how hi-tech communication is also robbing us of personal connection, communion. Instead of authentic, heartfelt connection, we get attention. And attention flits from one item to another, without ceasing, without pausing to ascertain the meaning (whatever that means); we don’t care about meaning; we just keep going. Is it any wonder there is a rapacious mental virus infecting our human world?

Every time I’m out for my morning walk with Scampi, I pass by IU students on their way to somewhere else, usually head down, open phone in hand. I’d say at least 50%  fit into that category; another 30% have their phones in hand, like a baby bottle; and some of both in these categories, plus probably 15% more, stride along with ear buttons, listening. Not here, but there. As long as they have their phone, they can walk in peace! But phones are not like pacifiers. Instead, unless we put on dreamy amnesiac playlists, they stir us into stormy emotions, which we either express openly as volatility, or try to contain. Contained, depressed, the emotions settle into fat on the body, as we hungrily eat what does not satisfy.

All of which makes me happy to have my little ambassador of Love, Scampi, by my side, prancing along, meeting whoever tears their attention away to glance down, a flicker of joy spreading across their face, as they plunge into childhood memories of their own pet dog. Sometimes, of course, they stop, look up, ask me if they can pet him. YES!

Sometimes, Scampi manages to actually interrupt the robotic digital acceleration we are all subjected to, all day and all night long.

So, to return to books, and the fact that I have actually resurrected the habit of, and the ability to, actually concentrate on the entirety of a printed book.

So many current reverberations from becoming more familiar with history!

For example, the book I’m currently pursuing, THE WAR FOR MIDDLE EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. 

I wrote this post specifically to draw your attention to two tiny nearly adjacent quotes from this book, ones which I copied into my journal this morning . . .

p. 25:

“Indeed, the moral necessity of war — as a check upon great evil — would emerge as a dominant theme common to the works of both authors.”

For .. .

“Though both men had reasons to despise what Tolkien called “the utter stupid waste of war,” they were both rooted in traditions that offered a more complex perspective on war and the human condition.”

 

This is how I feel about current “war” fronts, especially Iran, once again, heating up.

From my journal, in response:

“This is Trump’s point of view. Stalwart, determined, and if necessary, self-sacrificing.”

 

Yes, when confronted with great evil, the only option is to crush it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s as if I’ve plunged my fingers into very fertile soil, crawling with worms and seeds and roots, literary, linguistic, cultural, the crawling and speeding centuries disgorging their complexified fullness.

I’m using metaphor here to try to convey just how very very different it is to read a printed book.