Growth RingsSource: Michigan Quarterly Review; Fall2009, Vol. 48 Issue 4, p556-576
With the availability of e-books, we can now read a book without turning pages, without saving a place on a shelf for it afterward, but what is lost is the book as an object. An artifact of both writing and reading, a book is a physical representative of time like the trees from which it is made. The writer and the reader will both die, the mice will consume the papers they left in boxes. But the book will survive somewhere on some shelf. There, somebody will walk into the empty room, sit, and begin reading, and the book will change what they see outside. Even in its death, a book has matter, giving materiality to language and being substantial unto itself in a way that intangible memories and digital literature cannot be.