Transcendence

One of the things I enjoy most about my job is working with a group of like-minded bibliophiles. If you look up the word “bibliophile” at merriam-webster.com, you’ll see that below the definition of “a lover of books…,” there’s the example “for bibliophiles, no electronic device could possibly give the tactile pleasure of a beautifully bound book.”

I recently had an extended email conversation with my coworkers about why we could never completely give up “real” books in favor of electronic ones. We began with the visual, tactile, and olfactory – covers, bindings, marginalia, smells – and expanded into the emotional and magical: meaningful inscriptions, passing down beloved books from one generation to another, and the pure serendipity of opening a used book to discover a previous owner’s ticket stub or photographs.

In One for the Books, Joe Queenan says:

“Those of us who need to possess a physical copy of a book… are in some sense mystics… We believe the books possess the power to transubstantiate… We do not want the experience of reading to be stripped of this transcendent component and become rote and mechanical. That would spoil everything.”

And it would. Just as stripping work, learning, or life itself, of transcendence leaves only the rote and the mechanical – something gray straight out of 1984. This is what makes it worthwhile to get out of bed in the morning: to rise above the daily grind and find something truly worthwhile in going to work or simply in learning something new. One day it may be a spirited virtual conversation with peers, but another day it may be helping the team tackle the challenge of how to make learning fresh and, yes, transcendent.