The reader crosses a threshold from the book as an object into a transporting engagement with the surface of the writer’s language, and then through the language into living thought and imagination, into spaces and times and ascendancies of thought. The book that has drawn you into it has disappeared altogether as an object.
It’s the second week of classes at Wyoming Catholic College, and students all over campus incline their heads toward these artifacts that have survived from a different era. Open one, and it does not come on. Next to an iPhone or a laptop screen, it seems strangely inert: a bound stack of paper, pages covered on both sides with printed text, not a picture in sight. Who would think, just looking at it, that even one of them could contain worlds and change lives? We used to take it for granted.
Seeing so many books in the hands of students reminds me of the difference that the philosopher Martin Heidegger saw between an “object” and a “thing.” Heidegger, who found the deepest meanings of words in their roots, drew upon the sense of “gathering” in the word thing, which in ancient Germanic languages meant a deliberative assembly. We still use the word to mean a gathering when someone says they’re having a little thing tomorrow night to celebrate a birthday. Heidegger wanted to restore this sense and distinguish the “thing” from the “object” in its relation to “subject”—the famous subject/object distinction. The subject perceives, and the object over there, so to speak, is what is being perceived; subjectivity is inner (noticing, judging, feeling, reacting), whereas the object is outer and other, the recipient of this subjectivity.
It’s easiest to see why Heidegger preferred things with an example. The hammer as an object is a tool you see on the wall of the garage or hanging in your tool-belt. But as soon as you begin to use it, when it is in action, it is no longer an object at all but a thing in the sense that it is not “over there” but increasingly gathered into the act of hammering. The object always remains other than you, but the thing disappears into what you are doing with it. Surely, this phenomenon is especially true of books. As an object, a book is something you see and pick up; it has a certain appearance and heft. You might admire a leather-bound first edition of Huckleberry Finn or The Federalist Papers or notice how a much-read old paperback is falling apart. But the book is never an object when it is truly being read.
The reader crosses a threshold from the book as an object (covers, maps, lines of print, and margins) into a transporting engagement with the surface of the writer’s language, and then through the language into living thought and imagination, into spaces and times and ascendancies of thought. The book that has drawn you into it has disappeared altogether as an object—though, again, there is a great deal of crossing back and forth between the thing (the spellbound unity of reader and writer) and the physical object subject to underlining, marginal jottings, and paging back and forth to note repetitions or make connections.
It might be a truism that books change with the reader, but it is true, nevertheless. In the Iliad, which I am reading for the umpteenth time with this year’s freshman, I recently came upon the already-underlined description of Athena brushing away an arrow aimed at Menelaos as a mother brushes a fly from the face of her sleeping child—but now I thought about the toddler grandsons I saw last weekend. Not only does the much-marked page of my Lattimore translation disappear, but so do the millennia between me as a reader and Homer’s unexpectedly intimate observation of a mother 3000 years ago. It has never before struck me in the same way.
The lords of technology want more and more immediate interfaces, subtly guided by algorithms and commodified, and the effort reminds me of Shakespeare’s line: “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” We are a people of the Book (though not the Book alone), and Wyoming Catholic College, for all its commitment to real experience, finds its spiritual center in reading well and the genuine engagement it generates in living conversation. Emily Dickinson had it right: “There is no Frigate like a Book/To take us Lands away.” Books were things for her in the best sense, an economical route to the most ennobling truths:
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –
Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College’s weekly newsletter.
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