Readers, Writers, and Oystercatchers: Reflections on the Future of the Book

Abstract

Readers, Writers, and OystercatchersReflections on the Future of the Book Robert Bringhurst (bio) "Books," writes Robert Bringhurst, "are things that humans make, or try to make, as persistently as birds make nests, and we do it for similar reasons." In the following essay, the author mulls the future of these "cultural universals" that manifest as both oral books and the codex form, whether print or digital. THE PRESENT and the past are full of facts, sometimes easy to ignore but not so easy to escape. The future is mostly full of fictions. Some of us, hoping to escape the inescapable past and present, find the fictions of the future attractive for that reason. But fiction, as we know, can shed a lot of light on clotted facts. It can do this so well that some of us think that's what fiction is for. Here's a short (and entirely factual) vignette that bears upon this issue. In November 2022, a certain US politician, disgraced and out of office, formally announced that he would embark on another campaign. There were, of course, preliminary announcements of the announcement, to encourage media attention, and the media complied. And so, just before the event, a British journalist by the name of David Smith spoke on the phone with the Washington Post's associate editor, Bob Woodward. To the best of my knowledge, Smith has no monastic training, but in talking with his colleague, he employed a standard Zen technique： he posed a kōan. That is to say, he asked a seemingly dumb, slightly off-kilter question, seeking an unguarded, unpremeditated, illuminating response. Smith's kōan was "What's going to happen?" To which Woodward (also not, so far as I know, a Buddhist monk) gave a proper Zen reply: "You can't record the future" Smith then supplied what is known in the Zen world as jakugo, a phrase that sums things up. "You can't record the future, no," he said, "but you can revisit the past."1 That's not what I would call cosmic enlightenment, but it's a step in the right direction： an initial recognition that the future is reached through the past and the past through the present. We're the knot in which they're tied. The stakes are higher—much higher—in the slow parade of literate civilization than in the apoplectic shouting match of current American politics, but the same restrictions apply: no crystal balls, no tarot cards, no oracles. In thinking about the future—of the book, or of anything else—all we have to work with are the present and the past. Questions about the future are not, however, as casual and friendly as they once were. Our forefathers and foremothers could talk about the future—their own personal future or the future of their culture—without always having to ask at the same time whether humanity itself had any future. We have lost that luxury. One of the first things you realize when you contemplate cultural history is that civilizations are mortal. They all collapse sooner or later—but they don't all take the planetary ecosystem with them when they go. Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 38] _____ My own experience of books is, in most respects, the same as that of other readers and writers of my generation. My age-mates and I grew up in an analog world and have watched, with a wide spectrum of emotions, as that world grows more and more digital. We now read and write digital text, carry on digital conversations, listen to music in digital form, make and manipulate digital photographs, and consult the internet daily. To some of us, nevertheless, all that is digital smells of illusion. Benchmark reality—rocks and trees, rivers and mountains, tables and chairs, horses and dogs, ourselves and the people we know, the garden, the greenhouse, the forest—is outside the digital realm. By deduction as well as perception, real books belong to the realm of rocks and trees, not to the realm of pixels and megabytes. Like horses and dogs and tables and chairs, real books also require...