Wonderoom

It seems almost inevitable that a day will come when books will go the way of vinyl or the horse drawn carriage-existing only as nostalgia items, collector’s keepsakes.  Instead, we will have the Internet, sound recordings-whatever the latest fad of discreet units of data.  No books. No libraries as such. No book stores.  I think this bookless reality on the horizon,  more than anything else, makes me feel the passing of time.  A world where books are quaint, charming, passe.

I love the smell of old books, old libraries.  Oddly enough, they make me feel alive, like something exciting but hidden is somewhere near my grasp.  I used to spend hours at libraries, walking the stacks, not bothering with card catalogs (remember those?) or computers…just looking book by book for something new.  In ancient times books were revered by some as magical, sacred, almost absolute.  Now we have the Internet, among other electronic wonders, which is practically Borges’ library of Babel leaking into reality complete with Google searches which can run to seemingly endless lists of disconnected words.  So many of us spend countless hours searching it’s vast corridors.  Tlon isn’t just Wikipedia, or other clever mock-ups, it’s the Internet itself which can become our world, if we let it.