Microdosing Life
Books are a vibe whether we read them or not
When I was a kid I loved SNL writer Jack Handey’s Deep Thoughts—a series of one-liners that seemed to invent the Twitter joke format long before Twitter existed. I still think about this one a lot:
“There's a world that we know nothing about, that we can only imagine. And that is the world of books.”
It feels like less of a joke lately as I find myself reading more slowly and intermittently, finishing fewer books despite still wanting to read as much as ever, and staring wistfully at the stacks piling up at home that I know I won’t get to anytime soon. Part of this is just “life getting in the way,” but I know that this is also a widespread sentiment (and if you’re still reading as much as ever, congrats). The feeling of not reading enough has always existed but the present version has the particular flavor of its obvious causes: phones, the internet, and general media oversaturation. Writers have been lamenting the onset of post-literate society for decades and there’s no need to rehash these discussions about our widespread distraction by digital technology and the cultural ramifications of that—a discourse that has grown tedious anyway—but there is an aspect of this condition, which the Deep Thought above points to, that is worth mentioning:
In the age of post-literacy, there are still books everywhere. We just don’t read them.
Today, we still value the presence of books, perhaps as much as ever, and well beyond our concern with what they have to say. We appreciate them at a distance. The book’s contemporary role isn’t merely decorative, though—we interact with them in countless other ways, buying and selling them, giving them as gifts, bringing them to the beach and on vacation, carrying them around in public, forming book clubs, hanging out in bookstores, posting excerpts and references and images of book covers on social media, and using books as building blocks of our own identities. Literary discourse and literary scenes still populate our culture and our cities and our imagination. When the last Sally Rooney novel came out, I saw hundreds of posts about the book without ever learning anything about what happens in it. Books are a vibe, one might say, and a welcome one at that.
And yes, plenty of actual reading does still happen—it would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise—but this is less central to the mainstream experience of books. Post-literate culture is characterized not by the absence of text but by its diffusion into the environment as an ambient presence, a fulfillment of McLuhan’s assertion that the content of any medium is always another pre-existing medium. Books are thus content for TV and the internet. Maybe we like them even more now that we don’t have to read them.