“Why did he do it?”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“But how?”

I do have a purpose, an ultimate goal, but I tend not to pre-determine its length or breadth until a shape has been conjured out of an accumulation of questions and answers–words chosen one by one for how they illuminate the path ahead. I think it’s the way many writers do it.

This is risky. I’ve found myself up many dead ends. I’ve had many false starts. But writing in this manner, I have discovered unexpected things. I’ve been surprised and horrified. Even when unsuccessful, I have learned something worthwhile every time. And it’s a greater pleasure for me than only trying to explain what I think I already know (I’ll leave that sort of task to the academics). In this way, I’ve found answers which I didn’t yet have the questions for, and questions I’m still trying to answer. I’ve learned to write again after many years of believing I had failed to accomplish the singular goal in my life.

After all, I didn’t want to write novels that were just like the novels that have been written before.

When I was younger, I used to plan my stories. Chart a course–an arc to explain something I had already determined. The fastest way from a to b and then to c. I’d actually map this trajectory out in my notes. Minding my Strunk and White, I’d try to pare my sentences down and use fewer and plainer words wherever I might. I’d read that many writers used this method as well. But for me, this did not work.

The metaphor of travel matches very well.

I was recently in the midlands. The American Midwest–Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. It is a country I love, and my affection was renewed by avoiding the sterile flight of travel over the interstate and instead driving along the two-lane state routes where the bend of wonderfully named rivers, like White Breast Creek, the Fabius, The Maquoketa, The Racoon (North, South and Middle), Peas Creek, the North and South Skunk, and the several iterations of the English, can carry you away from your compass heading for mile after mile, until, thinking you will never get on course again, at last the trail straightens at a dusty bridge and the wanted course lies in front of you like a taunt ribbon. The up and down of the Indiana hills is as joyful as a carnival ride if your lunch is at least an hour behind. The more gentle waves of topography in Iowa would easily offer up that better known image of a green ‘ocean of corn’ in the earlier season, but cut down to stub and tattered husk, the fields shine like old silver in a lowering sun of Autumn.

On any mile of road I might find a new question to ask.

Why, on Route 224 amidst the wide-open farmland of Ohio, just a short distance from a cluster of grain silos, is there a magnificent cathedral rising from the plains at Ottoville. You can certainly read the story of the Immaculate Conception Church and its splendid stained glass windows easily enough, but nowhere was it explained exactly why this should be here, with a population density that would normally support little more than a chapel. I was immediately reminded of the medieval ages and the building of the great cathedrals of Europe. There is a true story at Ottoville and more than a few to imagine, knowing that the power of such faith can drive men and women in odd ways.

The towering silos and grain elevators are, by themselves–as the skyscraper is to the city–the true visual symbol of the Midwest. They are as ubiquitous and awesome as natural phenomena. The grain elevator is both  necessary and dangerous, directly affording a living for tens of thousands, and indirectly for us all, yet there are very few novels that take place around and about them. Calumet ‘K’ comes to mind, an excellent story by Merwin and Webster, but none others. I wonder why?

Another darker icon of the Midwest is the derelict house.

I have a habit of stopping at forsaken buildings. I cannot tell you exactly the reason. Perhaps it is that singular aspect among a remnant of yard trees grown gaunt and wind shattered, yet still guarding over the memories of the several generations who lived there.  I’ve seen thousands of abandoned houses on the prairie through the years, with windows haunted now by odd lights, and more thousands of swaybacked barns and empty corn cribs posing as the desiccated remains of great beasts, with perhaps a single watchful crow knotted at a rusted cap of tin.

These dwellings evoke something in the heart of this city-boy that is not the same as the pity for a derelict townhouse. I wonder if it’s a memory within my genetic code, planted there by all those farmers who were my forebears. But by their solitary stature, these isolated fragments beg to be reconsidered. They begin or end in stories that you can only re-imagine–but you can imagine.

I stop briefly at a Gothic masterpiece of tall windows and double doors–two tall stories beneath a sharply pitched decorative slate roof with several thin fluted chimneys of brick. Looking for decay, the blood red band of colored slate accented the keen level of the roof line. The peeked caps on each of the dormers were repeated large above a front porch and again at the side above a veranda…But all of the windows were boarded over with raw lumber which had turned gray with age. As I rolled just beyond, I caught sight of a small brick ranch style home, just behind the larger house, which shared the same driveway. There was a fenced yard there and a dog and the color of children’s yard toys.

What was the story there? A contested will? A son who would not live in his father’s house? A young wife who could not bear the ghosts of a past she did not comprehend?

Barns, by themselves, take an infinite variety of form and shape amidst the fields. Each one is an individual study in functionality and purpose. They are vernacular. Rectangular more often than not, but dissimilar in many more important ways. So when I see an odd door with a knob, but no window, high on a singular turret above the fields, with no stair or apparent other use, I wonder why. My bookish brain conjures the unfinished tower at the House of Shaws from the novel Kidnapped and Uncle Ebenezer’s attempt to do away with young David Balfour on a dark and stormy night. Or, when I see the odd words ‘Mail Pouch’ writ large for all from a quarter mile away on the weathered boards, I am compelled to ask, what is that?

My grandfather chewed ‘Red Man’ tobacco and I was never exposed ‘Mail Pouch.’

Look. Far out amidst the furrows of a hundred neatly tended acres is a single column of brick. It is not so surprising to see this ancient chimney there, without the house it once warmed, so much as awesome to contemplate the reverence of the farmer who takes the trouble each season to wield his mighty John Deere combine around this obstruction, out of hallowed respect for his ancestors.

Further on, and quite suddenly, at the side of a road where deep gullies had defined mile after mile of farmland, a curb appears. This edging of stone has been battered by snow-plows and ages of road repairs, but it endures. Slowing, I looked about the empty autumn fields for some sign of its purpose as I roll by, and then it curves to an end and perhaps ten yards further on it rises again. I stop to look closer. There is nothing about me but the shiver of yellowed roadside grass, a tire-smashed soda can, birds on a telephone wire, and a house so distant I cannot see if it is modern or old–but close to the brim of the road, running up to the granite edge which is still as proudly straight as the day it was set in place, there are cobble stones. Ahead, I can see the curb has ended again and then starts once more, like hyphens on the prairie page. Across the road I see the collar of another curb now, peaking out of the gravel there.

Oh my!

Once there was a whole town here–on this spot. I’m standing on what had been a single block of a neighborhood now vanished–of a hundred or a thousand lives lived and gone…and I turn in search of the river that must be close. Instead, and finally, like the fool wandering in a forest upon first noticing he is lost, I see the straight low ridge where railroad tracks once filed, running away to a darker horizon.

Where did it all go? A tornado perhaps? A prairie fire?

The first automobiles must have parked at this curb. There would have been a gas station at one of these corners with two round glass heads on the pumps standing side by side. A dry goods store must have done well out of the passing traffic and the occasional Saturday extravagance of families cash poor but rich in all else. An ice-cream parlor could have been right there, too. I’ve read that they were crazy for ice cream at the turn of the last century. And before the Second War, over that way across the road, perhaps a Hy-Vee tried to make a go of it selling groceries against the self-sufficiency of Iowa farm frugality. And a church or two must have towered to one end or the other. They might even have had a mayor for a time, and a bank…Was the bank closed the evening Jesse James stopped here to rest his horses on his way to the ignominy of Northfield. It could have been…And all of that well before the railroad trunk lines were made useless by the Interstates.

Driving on, there is a interesting mix of self-wonder and frustration when I voluntarily halt on my way at an abused stop sign marking only a vague corner. A dirt road divided at the center by tall grass meets the gray of the asphalt without even the usual arc of muddied tractor wheels, and with not a soul to be seen for miles in any direction. This halt is not to avoid being ticketed by an unseen state trooper hiding in the grass. I do it as a hat-tip to civilization, past and present. But as I obey, I still must ask the question, why is this sign here?

Who once died at this place, and do they who pass here now each day still remember? Or have neighborhood kids simply found another small outlet for their creativity. First imagining the habitual turn of eyes upon a father’s face grown old many years too soon, I choose to smile at the possibility of a prankster instead.

My one repeated wish, as I go along, is that I could be driving a pick-up truck instead of my little Ford Escape. As it is, entering a one-street town, I have announced myself by the time I find a place to park. The woman at the counter of the feed and hardware store knows I am a tourist before I can phrase my first question. If I was in an F-150 I might possibly get past a few sentences before she is on to me and offering polite suggestions while pointing up the road toward the I-80. I want to eat in the cafe where she ate her own breakfast the hour before, not the Bob Evans at the interchange. I would have liked to have slept in the motel that was built by her Uncle Frank back after he came home from Vietnam, not the Day’s Inn. His picture is there, beside the display of 4-in-1 oil. But she is trying to be helpful.

Several times I drove on with eyes ready for the cluster of cars that might signal the local eatery, only to find a hangout, a tavern. The smell of sour beer in the morning does nothing for me. The faces that turn to catch the light from the door strike me as a nest of mice uncovered beneath the cushion of a couch. We have such places in the city, I know, but this dark den out on the wide-open spaces seemed anomalous–and odd too.

I cannot get over the sense that those furrows in the fields are the ripples of a shallow sea and the farmsteads are like islands. Then, the other image comes to mind again. Placed as they often are on a breast of earth, the silos are turrets and the barns are battlements and the house and trees become castles above the plain, miniatures of what I saw once with my wife in Spain, and suddenly I am whistling a Broadway show tune as I race across and between.

Everything is in translation, of course. The visual language about me is turned to the words I know out of my need to comprehend it, but then I worry over the possibility that my own vocabulary is determining what I see. What is incomprehensible becomes invisible. I must look harder where I can.

In central Illinois I am often honked at by locals for slowing down where there is no more obstruction than the simple dumbfounding beauty of what they get to see every day. A cop pulled up behind me where I’d stopped beside the road to watch horses play in an open field. I looked in my rearview mirror as he called in my license plate number before getting out to speak with me.

He asks, “Is there a problem?”

I grab up my roadmap in defense. “Just checking my directions, thanks.”

Should you admit to a cop that you’re a sap?

Later, when the sun sets itself down on the earth with no ridge or building or tree-line to interfere, I cannot help but be taken with the beauty of that fire which seems to exude from every small pore and cut upon the skin of this great body from which we have come and to which we will return. The Bible may be understood at such a moment, and no particular religion is necessary.

In the night, red lights blink from distant towers, sandwiched far out in the darkness. The road is a dashed ribbon of white disappearing shortly before me. The air is sweet with hay. I love the smell of hay, in spite of my allergies. I’d rather sneeze than miss it. Having gotten well past a hog raising area, the window is now open to the bluster of this perfume.

When a scattered rain begins to splatter amidst the stains and shadows of bugs on the windshield glass and turning the switch gets only a great grisly smear from the wipers where a clearer view was wanted, I pull over to let the dried remains of countless miles soften and rinse free. Cocooned within the little cab, I feel oddly unsafe, even with hazard lights blinking furiously. Perhaps it is the lightening that raises the hair on my neck. But there is no one else. I can see the fields about me as they alight with each flash and they are as empty as they will likely be until spring.

I step out into the weather. Two nights previous I had stood at a low ridge in Iowa and stared upward at stars vaulted from rim to rim. Here, lightening flares against the upside down terrain of clouds above. For the moment, I stand suspended upon an earth adrift amidst glistening bits of water set ablaze only by the lights of the automobile. I turn the motor and car lights off. The red beacons of the towers have been swallowed by a thicker downpour perhaps two or three miles away. There is no other up or down here, but for the fall of invisible rain that strikes at my raised face as if in anger.  The sputtering flashes amidst the clouds are no closer–and perhaps even moving away–but they maintain the sense of the hollow gap between heaven and earth, though not which is which. The rumbles are harder to distinguish. I am more alone, on my journey then, than before. Just for that instant, without the balancing perspective of the road, I might as well be half way between heaven and hell.

And then, over the mile behind me, a white beam trails up the dashed line in the asphalt. Someone else is coming and I’d better turn on my own lights again and be on my way.

I was up to speed by the time the pick-up reached me, so there was no danger on the narrow road. But my mind begs a different thought. What would have happened, had my motor refused to start. What would have happened next?

He would have stopped to inquire, of course. “What do we have here?” he would have said.

In college, I remember getting a lift once from a white-haired gent in a pick-up while hitch-hiking just below White River Junction on Route 5 in Vermont. A fierce rain had come up unexpectedly. All the way to Brattleboro he lectured me on dressing better for the weather and the foolishness of youth. That old fellow has probably passed on now, but remembering, I place the man, probably then no older than I am now, in the truck behind me. I watch his lights in my mirror for a mile or two to keep my distance in the rain. But shortly, he turned off the road toward a single small house with windows illuminated in yellow amidst a copse of trees. The red of a barn is visible in a flare of lightening. There is a silo as well, with a sign near the top I cannot read in the dark.

Driving on in the tunneled darkness, I imagine the skeptical look of his wife as she welcomes the stranger her husband has found on the road.

On a recent journey, it was simple enough to find a bookshop in a major city. A few perhaps. A Barnes &  Noble. An independent bookshop. Larger cities might even have two or more. Especially if there is a university close. Perhaps, if the city aspires to a significant intellectual life, you will find a good used bookshop as well. But most American cities today do not have an independent bookshop. A fact. Many do not even have a book chain outlet. The great majority do not have a used bookshop.

“We have the Wal-Mart. They have books, you know.  I’m pretty sure. Have you been up that way? I’d use the library myself.”

“What kind of things do you like to read?”

“Biography. I read that biography of Eli Manning last year. My daughter got it for me for Christmas. I think she got it from Amazon though.”

“What kinds of books do you take out at the library?”

“Oh, I don’t know. My wife does mostly. She likes mysteries.”

“What kind of mysteries does she like best?”

“Oh, I don’t know. This and that. I think she read the Da Vinci Code a while back.”

Pursuing the anecdote can be perverse. Your mind is adjusting to each answer and trying to find the question that might reveal a better truth than the one glaring at you. But it only gets worse.

Bookstores cannot survive if people do not care to read.

A friend of mine admonished me recently. He said I was being too negative. He works at a book printer and their business has recently seen an uptick. Then he cited the positive development of the ‘self-publishing’ industry.

This is something I have thought about myself. Thought too much about, I think.

So we all publish our own books. How nice.

No need for editors. No need for any authority that may tell us what we are writing is crap!

In twenty or thirty years, think of all the children cleaning out their parent’s homes after the funeral…Listen…

“What the hell are we going to do with these books? Daddy gave at least one copy to everybody in the family. What do we do with the rest of them? There must be a hundred more in that closet.”

I imagine some sour critic will be writing about this one day. But for the moment, my friend at the printer has seen an up-tick.

In Minneapolis I happily discovered that they have several fine used bookshops. The Book House in Dinkytown near the University reminds me of my own store (or the way it was once), and I spent several lovely hours there in the perfume of good literature. James and Mary Laurie Booksellers right in the middle of town is a totally unexpected treasure. The unique Uncle Hugo’s & Uncle Edgar’s carries both new and used titles piled high and deep. (There were more shops I never had the chance to see. I was in town for other reasons, and those demands were compelling.) The new book market in Minneapolis is dominated by a large and seemingly healthy Barnes & Noble, but there is one shop I totally missed, about which I had heard great things, Magers & Quinn, and now I am feeling quite guilty for my miss. It’s a large city and all those one-way streets eat up a lot of time if you don’t know your way.

But in another, smaller college town, Tiffin, Ohio, there is nothing. There is a large library which has made itself useful as a community center, where much of the floor space has been emptied of bookcases. Books have been replaced by computer monitors. The one used bookshop in Tiffin before this is gone now. The one new bookshop remaining is really just a very large newsstand offering a better than average selection of magazine titles, but that appears to be on its last leg as well, with every other light turned out in the ceiling fixtures to save energy. The darkness of the store from the outside is in keeping with the empty windows of the other shops in so many of the splendid older buildings there, but the Book Nook was still open as of October 24th.  And, there is, of course, a Wal-Mart in Tiffin if you are looking for a James Patterson title.

For most small cities and larger towns in American these days, there is no need for a bookshop, new or used. It is unwanted. A supposed fact, which I was told more than once.

“Why do we need a bookshop? All they print is trash anyway.”

The digital television dishes sprout at the rooftops from Abington Massachusetts to Fort Dodge, Iowa. Wi-Fi is available almost everywhere.

I missed Bookworms and Videos in Fort Dodge. I asked if there was a shop in town and was told no. Later, at a gas station a fellow said he thought there was one, but “they mostly have movies.” Now, on-line, I see someone has said that Bookworms has “many used books to choose from, at a very low price.” Sorry I missed that. If true, it makes them unique. Dozens of such inquiries in dozens of other towns netted me nothing but long pauses, hesitations, corrections of forgotten memories, and in many cases the much used, “We do have a library.”

The sum of my recent journey was quite wonderful. Old route 50 is a glorious road which I would recommend to anyone not in a hurry. And if you are in a hurry, it is you who are at fault. But don’t look for bookshops.

The saddest moments of the trip were spent looking through windows, hazy with a film of grime, at vacant shelves fallen down to floors littered with an empty coffee cup or two left behind by movers long gone.

The civilization I knew is dying. Some are quite happy about this, or so I’ve read. And heard. But I doubt these comments are made with any constructive thought. There seems to be a desire to destroy without any rational idea of what might replace what has been lost, or what might be accomplished in the aftermath.

And in the interim, technology had made communications fabulously cheap. The sheer wealth of data is overwhelming. And because the education system has been so geared for so long toward socializing the populace to the acceptance of the currently common prejudices (oddly called ‘diversity’ in a new bit of Orwellian misdirection), there is little chance for a recovery. The printed word is being lost even as I write this. Libraries are well along in the process of divesting themselves of those ‘troublesome books.’ Better to have the electronic database that can be updated, scourged, cleaned, homogenized, and replaced at the touch of a button.

And there is no outcry. Eyes glaze over at the suggestion that there is something wrong.

“Books are too expensive.”

Or,  “Look at this. I can store 4000 books in this one Kindle! Why do I need to fill up space with a lot of dead trees?”

Why, indeed.

“I see you have the new McCullough book. What do you think of it?”

“Oh. I got that for Christmas. But it’s so heavy. I’ve downloaded it onto my iPad. I read the first part. But I’ve been a little too busy to finish it.”

This from someone who has spent hundreds of hours this year messaging friends on twitter, watching sitcoms and sports on television, and downloading the latest movies.

With scholarship debased to the level of a Wikipedia entry, who will stand as the authority now?

The mob was once the tool of the orator, a group small enough to gather within the sound of a single voice, and large enough for a lynching, the scope of its violence limited by simple geography. Now, the mob is the greater force, web-wide, unaccountable, and available to do the bidding of any self-appointed Marat in the flash of a twitter feed.

The politics of the tweet is as limited as a scream. Perhaps that is the appropriate zeitgeist of our new age.

Reading a book is a quiet endeavor–a silent dialog. Not limited to 140 characters, we are alone with the many words of an author. We must pursue the communication–the relating of fact, inquiry, questions, acceptance, doubts, denials, inspiration, revelation–as individuals. We may join a mob after the fact, but only at the loss of that thread of conversation that informed us.

I saw a hundred splendid farms on my journey. I saw men and women working into the dark of the evening to prepare the soil for the winter months before the onslaught of bad weather. I have seen this before during planting season, as well as for the harvest.

Alone in my car, I thought to myself, those farmers live in a more comforting world, for all the troubles of weather and finance. In their cosmos, this method or that will produce a more certain result. They must plant before this time or the crop will not flourish. They must harvest by that time or the crop will be spoiled. I suppose books may be of little importance to someone who must work a sixteen-hour day, seven days a week, when the weather is prime. And there are other jobs which have similar demands. But over the longer year–during the farmer’s winter months–can the culture that makes their lives possible survive if they are so uninformed as to vote for whomever offers the largest subsidy?

I know that books were the winter refuge of the New England farmer. To this day you can find barns filled with moldering volumes of past generations. The Yankees read. Knowledge was not to be feared. And when I run across their letters tucked within the endpapers, I am often astonished at the use of language and the depth of thought. Newspaper clippings detail special interests. Marginal pencil notes tell me that they had their doubts about this or were excited by that. Gift inscriptions express the heartfelt belief that the book in hand was important and worth the time of someone else’s life, when time was not to be wasted.

When ‘college students’ demand their educations for ‘free’ without reasoning the ‘cost’ to others, and refuse to read anything that might disturb their self-absorbed ideas of academic necessity, I wonder what has happened to the world of the University, where those students were supposed to be informed by professors who had some inkling of the larger whole–the bigger picture, and the meaning of words. Clearly books are not a part of that equation now.

Authority is evil. Is that the deal? Wikipedia is all they need.

Until the lights go out.

Slavery, the forcible enslavement of one human being for the purpose of another, is variously defined as bondage, servitude, and thralldom–all aspects of ownership, subjection, control, and captivity.

Now the question arises: what part of this idea, if any, do you not understand today?

Let’s make this personal. Speaking at the safe remove of the third person is a waste of breath and ink or ether. I am personally interested in the answer. What is your difficulty with this Constitutional prohibition on slavery or the definition given here? Do you disagree with it? A part of it? What part is that?

The questions are not rhetorical, nor is the issue. For instance, in my youth I first encountered the vague idea that slavery was having to do anything one does not wish to do. The irrational link between the necessity of supporting oneself by whatever means was legally and morally available, and the forcible enslavement of another human being to do your work for you, was just one of many incoherent ideas being bandied about by self-appointed intellectuals at the time. The simple fact that it was the work of others that supported them while they toyed with such foolishness seemed to escape their awareness.

The fellow who once said, “Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have. The course of history shows us that as a government grows, liberty decreases,” knew a great deal about this. He was the author of a Declaration of Independence from the forced authority of British rule. And he was a slaveholder. He looked into the eyes of slaves. He spoke to them and heard their complaints.

Unreasonable and emotional prejudices shape most political beliefs. Few people take the time to examine the consequences of their wishes. There are literally thousands of bad concepts for the government of society and only a few that seem remotely promising. And each and every one of the dozens that I have studied have essential flaws. The problems almost always arise in the application of philosophy to the realities of life. Human beings can be irrational and thus undependable. The sum total of human knowledge is vastly overwhelmed by the magnitude of human ignorance, but we must act on what we know or die.

The Greeks (together a veritable cornucopia of bright ideas) had the interesting concept of assigning their governance to a body of wise elders. The idea came apart in less than a generation because the sympathies of one elder conflicted with another and the oligarchy quickly gave up benevolence for self-aggrandizement. People tend to look out for their own welfare first. It’s a fact. It’s essentially a good fact. Otherwise more people would get run over in the street.

Once, just about the time the Thirteenth Amendment became law in the United States, a couple of Germans tried to codify another political philosophy. The idea of the Germans was that everyone would be equal by force. One person could not work harder and thus gain an advantage. Another person could not speculate on the intelligence or ignorance of their fellows and thus attain riches. When attempted afterward, as would predictably happen in such a structured concept of society, some people were quickly more equal than others and these showed no more wisdom than the wise oligarchs of ancient Greece.

Despite the repeated failure in practice of the political ideals designed by those German geniuses, there are many who suppose that the idea of forced equality still has merit–that we should all be slaves to each other. It is just a matter of correct application. A few million more lives (more or less) and they will get it right after all. The use of force and the absolute corruption of such power does not disturb their thinking.

A couple hundred years ago a small gathering of Americans, including Mr. Jefferson, had the bright idea of maximizing human nature. Let people be people. Use the law not to restrict human beings but to restrict government. It seemed to them that whatever human beings did, the one thing that always went really awry was their government. One nasty fellow might kill another for his crop, but this infraction could be dealt with by the community. However, no one community could set itself against the power of a nation-state that wanted everyone’s crop. Dealing with individual wrong was easier than dealing with the evil of entire armies. Let government be the restriction of authority, not the governed. This was a stroke of true genius. It hadn’t been done before.

After thousands of years and tens of thousands of political experiments, it had never occurred to anyone that the best thing laws could do effectively was to limit government. Many practical applications had been tried–in England for instance–to restrict those tendencies which might result in the dictatorship of the many by the few, but now the better of those laws could be used within a larger framework which offered a wholly new concept of liberty and of human freedom.

Sadly, change does not happen overnight. The vested interests of Thomas Jefferson and others in the existing slavery persisted. It took almost four generations and horrors unimagined by Jefferson on his little mountain to rid us of this most fundamental evil of all. But it was done. When persuasion failed, civil war was necessary. The great Greeks had failed this test, but, at last, this battle was won here and the Thirteenth Amendment was written.

Still it must be asked, ‘How could a man as smart as Jefferson have been a slaveholder.’ The answer is too simple for some to contemplate. His slaves were a large portion of the value of his property. His property represented his inheritance and the security of his family. It was against his short-term self-interest to give them up. Ideals were set aside for expediency. Being smart was not a guarantee of being right or good.

Another slaveholder, Andrew Jackson said, “eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty.” Vested interests grow. Human beings are really no smarter now than they were two hundred years ago or two thousand years ago. The toys may be better now because of an accumulation of technical knowledge (and an established acceptance of the freedom to use that knowledge), but human beings still look out for their own interest first. And the vastness of their own ignorance inevitably means they will often see their interests unwisely.

This truth was noted by our forefathers many times in their writings. Their idea was that the best government would not be the self-interested rule of a single king, or even a small coterie of oligarchs, but of the broadest gathering of the nation as a whole, and thus prejudice would balance itself for all.

For their part, the politicians charged with overseeing the process of this relatively free society look out for their own interests first as well. Power is the soul of politics. Money may be the mother’s milk, but power is the means to the end. Re-election is the first priority. Those who designed this government two hundred years ago discussed these concerns in depth in the Federalist Papers. They knew it would happen. Their answer was to write restrictions on the politicians. The thirteenth amendment was finally one of those restrictions. Yet even then they correctly feared that human nature would find a way to spoil their purpose.

When I was a youth the government had the power to draft me into military service, a leftover authority from a world war that was supposedly won before I was born. They had the legal right to my body and my labor. I objected then, but not conscientiously. At the time a conscripted army was considered the only way for a great nation to secure a military force sufficient to carry out its aims. But it was costly, inefficient, and produced second-rate soldiers who felt like the slaves they were and did their duty grudgingly. For their own part, the military felt emboldened in the power this holding provided and proceeded accordingly. Only after a great failure in Vietnam and national disillusionment was the idea given up before a rising tide of discontent and the all-volunteer army was re-born. Today that army is by far the best and most efficient on Earth. Sadly, the very quality of the force has emboldened politicians again to use it unwisely.

Slavery as an institution was common over most of the earth’s surface, land and sea, when the Thirteenth Amendment was written into the Constitution. Today chattel slavery is still a practice common in many places. Thankfully, in the nation where I had the good fortune to grow up, such slavery was long gone but for the echo of prejudice that made it possible in the first place. However, the belief that some people were inferior to others was still around and about. And out of such remnant ideas, there will always be vested interests busily trying to establish dominion for government which will further institutionalize the enslavement of some for the good of others.

The concept that because some people will not thrive in an unstructured society, or have physical or mental handicaps, others must be forced to support them, is an old one. Plato discussed this in the Republic two thousand years ago. Jefferson even used the idea as an excuse for not giving his own slaves their freedom. Government is necessary to take care of those who are unable to help themselves, as determined by that same government. That the exercise of such power will lead inevitably to that same government securing its own rule with ever greater restrictions, and the assumption of the reins of authority in the hands of a few, is well established. Simply, the dictatorship grows out of fear for the loss of its own power.

We are still an ignorant lot. What we don’t know is far more than what we can imagine. But we have learned some things, and we cannot ignore this knowledge now just to achieve another vaguely supposed ideal. Better that we expend that energy on solving those matters of ignorance that clearly plague us. As ever, people will act in what they believe to be their own self-interest. If the case is made that they should give up some measure of freedom to buy an equal amount of security (say, health insurance) they may accept this bargain as fair, without understanding the larger context and failing to see that such power has a cost far beyond monetary value.

A commonly heard refrain in my lifetime is some version of ‘They have it, therefore I should have it too.’ This is not a result of some logic or understanding. It is another example of simple self-interest. The reasons for the restrictive clauses of the Constitution are to inhibit government from buying power by dispensing favors to satisfy such urges. Self-interest cannot be done away with, nor even well managed, but it certainly should not be catered to. It is only the amalgam of a nation of self-interested individuals which will amount to the balance of a free and open society first imagined in the Constitution. If we are each free to pursue our own happiness unrestricted by the wishes of others, we may achieve the greatest result.

The most fervent religious beliefs make use of self-interest to establish their power over the natural interests of the individual. Heaven awaits. Others be damned. Yet, what most becomes a free and open society is a Christian ethic of ‘do to others what you would have them do to you.’ And this is self-interest at it utmost.

Over the last few generations, in the name of good (always the ‘common’ good) government has assumed ever greater power to dispense favors to some at the expense of others. What has been achieved in that time is a sort of virtual slavery of the few for the many. If you don’t pay your taxes you will be punished or go to jail. There are immediate benefits to paying your taxes in the form of ‘gifts’ from the government, and fewer benefits for those who delay their gratification for long term goals and work to achieve their own dreams.

As always, some being more equal than others, there are those who pay little or no tax but enjoy the benefits. This is the case with the very poor and the very rich. And the very rich, who commonly exercise the control of government, use the spectre of the suffering poor to moralize for their ever greater reach. It is not accidental that there are as many poor today (percentage wise—there are far more in actual numbers of course) as there were in 1965 at the start of the current regime of our welfare state. Presidents and Congresses come and go but the welfare state always grows, and so grows the number of administrators to carry out the self-interest of that government.

Now, the latest reach of government is not unexpected. It is fifteen years in the making. The government wants further rights to your body. They will tell you how to care for your health and the means you may use to do it. But those in the middle, not employed by that government (but who will be forced to pay for this new authority), have objected. And for this they are reviled by those in power, and by those who think they benefit by that authority. How could anyone object to such a good idea? Don’t they understand? It’s for their own good. No! They are too stupid. They must be made to be good!

And they will be. By any means.

It is a contradiction flavored by irony that those in power who fear the objections are the first to accuse the objectors of violent intent and call for even more restrictions to put them in their place. The power is, as always, in the hands of the masters. This tableau has played out many times over history. Perhaps it is in our short-term interest to lay back and endure it. But the slave does not forget that they are in bondage. And the time will come.

The trend of history, punctuated by revolt and renewal, has been undeniably toward greater human freedom because it inevitably benefits the greatest number. Being naturally short-sighted in our ignorance the majority may succumb again and again to the promises of political sirens, but it is ever more difficult now to pretend our demands for gifts are anything less than the graft and patronage of a democracy gone awry. As Tocqueville warned, voting ourselves gifts has a predictable end. Bankruptcy. National failure. And revolution. It has happened before.

To the consternation of homogenous European nations long used to social engineering and the management of authority, Americans are by nature more independent and diverse. The immigrants who have made us were those who had the courage to come. This is no small matter. We are not smarter, but we are by nature more difficult and more willing to see our self-interest in unusual ways. Though significantly diminished, there is still a continuing ethic of delayed gratification to achieve long-term desires.

Those who now sneer at the ‘tea party’ movement should note that these are the people who are paying the taxes on which the government, its minions, and its gift giving depends. They are the true workers for whom those Germans feigned concern. They are capable. They are resourceful. And each insult delivered by those who govern only weakens the bonds which tie them to their masters.

In my short lifetime I have witnessed the repeated failure of the welfare state and the ‘Detroitization’ of great cities, as well as the demonstrated rejuvenation of others through common free enterprise. The fear of failure keeps many people from trying themselves. The messiness and unpredictable nature of an open society bothers many who crave safety and security above all else. The phoenix-like transformation of New York City between 1975 and 1995 may seem like magic to anyone who did not do the back-breaking work to achieve it. Now, with the accession of managers to the offices of innovators, New York has begun a decline once again. But it must be remembered that it required the bankruptcy of 1975 to open the minds of the politicians to the alternatives that made 1995 possible.

I do not wish such a bankruptcy on my nation now, in these troubled times. There are those who will take full advantage of the moment. But we have been here before–back when garbage tumbled unrestrained through the mean and graffiti stained streets of New York. Politicians wallowed then in their power as they condemned the citizens for our ‘national malaise,’ and preached ever-greater sacrifice. It is astonishing to me that my own prosperous and overfed generation does not want to remember even so recent a past. It is incomprehensible that they should condemn their own children back to the future that is upon us.

So I ask again, what is it about the concept of slavery that you do not understand? Do you not realize the power over your body that you have just given to others who do not have your best interest at heart? You do in fact have the government you deserve. You voted for it, because you were looking out for your own interests–for yourself. You chose these masters.

But I did not. And there are others who did not.

For my part, I object to my fellow citizens who so easily give up their freedoms for promises and false premises. But perhaps that slaveholder Mr. Jefferson, like the slaveholding Greeks of so long ago, had insight for this as well: “A little rebellion is a good thing,” and “every generation needs a new revolution.”

Slavery is the most common system of organized labor in human history. That it persists today in all its forms is a testament to its usefulness and success. That it exists at all in the United States today would be a surprise to most readers of this essay.

It may come as a further surprise to some that we are all going to die. Some sooner than others. And a few other matters might be pertinent. Most of what people think they know is wrong. Life is not fair, nor will it ever be. Right and wrong are not arbitrary, nor are they absolute. The first thing they should be worried about is their own ignorance. The second thing to worry about is the ignorance of the person who will determine what happens to them next.

The subject here is slavery, the forcible enslavement of one human being for the purpose of another. The problem for me in discussing it only begins with suggesting that most of my readers are at least indentured and probably worse. I can only guess how they will accept the categorization of their own bondage.

There are issues in our time which can no longer be civilly discussed. Abortion, for instance. Opening such topics produces a visceral response. Any chance for rational parley is immediately lost. There are words which have been removed from our grammar. They cannot be spoken. There are names which have been demonized beyond any possibility of true appreciation. This is the way it once was with the peculiar institution of slavery.

But the history of slavery is elsewhere being re-written even as I address my topic. And more importantly, the language is being altered to suit vested interests.

The art of relabeling and calling the forced labor of one human being to benefit another by a different name, of finding excuses which make it more palatable, and of inventing political necessities which are schooled into the popular culture to make the act acceptable by the slaves themselves is just a part of the many unexamined atrocities of modern life. But most people don’t want to hear anything about it, much less deal with it.

This last bit is essentially an example of how much of established authority is endangered by any closer examination. If it is not spoken of, it does not exist. Thus, my purpose here is only to draw attention to it, not fulfill the scholarly or scientific functions of mapping or perform a bloody dissection.

A key mistake would be to assume the silence is part of a conspiracy. But conspiracy is not necessary when the act itself has been redefined. The dialectic of modern slavery is a part of the fabric of our society. It is a profoundly revealing phenomena that many people who would be harshly critical of Thomas Jefferson for being a slaveholder can accept the idea that half of the adult population in the United States today must work to support the other half. And not by choice, but by force. Any direct and explicit poll of the citizenry concerning taxation proves this. The excuses fly. The fact remains. Most people, even many of those who must work twice as hard to support the others, believe in their own de-facto slavery.

‘Chattel’ slavery is outright ownership of another human being as property. This is less common today, though it still exists in parts of Asia and Africa. A primary difference between chattel slavery and modern slavery is that with ownership comes value and thus some care for the property, as well as responsibility, however meager. State controlled slavery is no more kind, and usually less. Human beings are used for whatever purposes the political authority sees fit. ‘For the good of the Fatherland’ has moved many armies. Even the Generals sent their sons into the machine guns at Somme in 1916.

For more than half of the Nineteenth Century the issue of slavery was argued until the very topic became anathema in polite company, just as certain topics are today. But with the passing of a hundred and sixty years, and the assumption of the final defeat of slavery in our Civil War so long ago, the issue has cooled. That our society is still dependent on many of the mechanisms of slavery is generally ignored.

There are many approaches to the matter as a whole. Let me address just a few that come easily to mind—my mind of course. You may have your own examples.

The ‘mechanizing’ of modern life is the great failed theme of the Twentieth Century. The State needs the workers to produce the goods and pay the taxes which allows the state to function. Charlie Chaplin comically lampooned the dilemma in Modern Times. His imagery was precisely hewn to the sense of many that their value as individuals had been sacrificed on an alter of machine-age efficiency. The great boon of modern science had been turned not to a better life but a more productive life. To what purpose? A longer and healthier employment, so that more might be produced? To what end? So that more wars can be waged? Is there any surprise then that so many people in the most advanced nations have simply stopped making more people rather than continue the cycle?

The ‘dehumanization’ of factory work was part of the cause of Ned Ludd in 1810. His issue was the transformation of human beings into slaves for the machine, and the loss of better values. That farm work was even more dangerous and easily as grinding and repetitive could be ignored against the more dramatic imagery of steel and fire. As wrong-headed as the Luddite tactics were, their analysis was not so bad. Anyone who has worked around a cotton loom would understand this, even while wearing the better and cheaper clothing it produced.

We accept this education to interact well with the machine from an early age. We may question someone’s judgment about politics but we will automatically fit our lives into the routine necessary to make the machine function correctly—questioning the time allowance or pay perhaps, but seldom the work itself.

What is more important to me here is that the process of adjusting human behavior to work well with machines taught us many things. Mostly about controlling mass human behavior. And politics is the craft of such manipulation

The key to political hegemony is language. Armies may win battles but ruling requires a mastery of words. Controlling the language can make the need for chains unnecessary. George Orwell, wrote most clearly of this phenomena in his prescient novel, 1984. He introduced a whole lexicon of useful terms to describe it: ‘Blackwhite,’ the loyal willingness to say black is white when the party discipline demands it; ‘Doublethink,’ believing in two contradictory ideas at the same time; ‘Memory hole,’ where documents go to be destroyed (this a pet fear of my own in this age when books are being replaced with the fungible digital record); ‘Ministry of Love,’ law and order; ‘Ministry of Peace,’ war; ‘Ministry of Plenty,’ rationing; ‘Ministry of Truth,’ propaganda.

But my favorite of Orwell’s terms are: ‘Newspeak,’ language where all ’politically incorrect’ words have been removed; ‘Sexcrime,’ sex for personal pleasure; ‘Thoughtcrime,’ to think something not authorized by the state; ‘Unperson,’ an individual banished from society and their very existence expunged (Someone who has been vaporized); and finally, ‘Ownlife,’ individualism and eccentricity (Being solitary, acting by yourself); ‘Resistance,’ those who defy authority (always the cause of government failure rather than the government itself); and ‘Freedom,’ being able to say two plus two equals four without fear of retribution.

Now the ‘Ministry of Truth’ has brought us a ‘Troubled Asset Relief Program’ for insolvent (bankrupt) banks; a ‘War on terror’ for war, Hatespeach for saying anything politically incorrect; Hatecrime: for committing a crime, and many more verbal inventions.

The politics of modern slavery are rather obvious but typically ignored. (Wiggle your toes in your Chinese made shoes and forget about the twelve year old slave who made them.) The most successful political subterfuge of the past two centuries are the various forms of ‘socialism’ under which, supposedly, everyone will be made equal—thus we are all slaves to one another. This appeals to the aesthetic sensibility of the few who believe they are naturally better than the rest of humanity and thus, as in Orwell’s other authoritarian classic Animal Farm, are more equal than others. They believe they will inevitably rise to the surface, like cream, to be the ones in charge.

Because of the supposed ‘leveling’ effect of socialism, this also appeals to the mind that sees all human beings as nasty and soiled creatures unworthy of nature’s bounty. There is a whole school of belief in the purity and righteousness of nature (not including humans, of course), as if this was at some level of godly perfection before it was spoilt by mankind.

Having been raised around the weakened influence of one sect of slavery or another, but in a generally free condition, and in a country established as a harbor of human liberty (however faulty), I have had the opportunity to observe the machinations of more than one disguise for the various forms of human bondage in my time. I do affirm that humanity in general has drifted toward some significant improvements over the ages. The slavery of the factory town in China today is by degree better than the chattel slavery of the Virginia plantation of 1776.

The wealth of nations has provided for a higher standard of living for most people, especially in those countries influenced by a Western sense of human value based on the worth of the individual. Still, given the brief history of such improvement and the generally weak foundation for it, I cannot help but worry that this too shall pass. Perhaps the Luddite had one thing right: with a dependence on technology comes a debasement of human value and thus with the rise of the machine (computer) we have made ourselves dispensable.

Whatever the disguise for slavery in the particular ruling political system, most people object to the idea of thinking of themselves as slaves to anything. This is human nature. (The other guy may be a slave, but I am doing this because I want to). Yet this, not unexpectedly, is a source of hope for any libertarian–that human beings will, on their own and as they have through recorded history, work their way toward some state of greater individual freedom.

The most successful technique for outright human bondage over the past century in the United States is the income tax. It has all the best features of a working system of slavery. It is forced. It is enforceable. It is applied to wages thus the few who act as masters and receive their compensation in other forms do not have to pay or may pay taxes at reduced rates depending on their privileged positions in the hierarchy of authority. And it can be made ‘progressive.’

This last quality is a form of genius unknown to Egyptians or Romans or even Virginians in past slave dependent societies. Those who might elicit the mercy of their fellow citizens to some infirmity or handicap are excused, thus giving the appearance of ‘progressive’ kindness to the system. Unfortunately, as with all such systems, the mechanics falter on the simpler forms of human imperfection, especially self-interest. Systems are abused, taken advantage of and become heavy with inequities.

But, income tax has a more important flaw. It is obvious. Every slave can readily see what is being taken from his labor.

An alternative, the sales tax, is useful for the fact that it can be collected on the goods that human beings need to live. And it’s cheap because the person who collects the tax is a slave to this duty, under penalty of law. But this too is very obvious. As the tax increases, people become restive at the open theft.

Thus, a new system, designed by some European geniuses, has been proffered. The ‘Value Added Tax.’ VAT. With VAT, all manufactured goods are taxed at each stage of production. This has the added quality of being both discrete and discreet. The buyer at each stage of manufacture has no idea of the amount of the tax that is already built into the item when it reaches them. In addition, a sales tax can still be placed on the item at the retail end. Oh joy!

One form of vicarious entertainment for some libertarians, myself included, is the political passion-play over taxes. With each increase, there is a predictable outcry. The abuse of tax revenues by government is too obvious. The amounts are so enormous it is difficult to imagine—especially now that we speak of ‘trillions’, a number so great that a thousand human beings living a thousand consecutive lifetimes could not count to one.

The enormous success of income tax collection has outstripped the imagination of the best authorities. Simply by applying this one disguise they have successfully enslaved all the productive members of an entire society.

By offering ‘tax breaks’ and ‘loop holes’ to the chosen managers (re: bosses), they can fund almost any architecture for their plantations. All the while, public schools properly educate the workers to their roles of submission and the politically licensed news media offer ‘newspeak’ to quell the anxiety or fuel it as needed. When some slaves manage to escape the cycle, new workers can be imported from countries which haven’t achieved our success.

The cost of maintaining even an average standard of living in America, with taxes removing more than half of family income, requires both parents to work. The crucial guidance and passing of values that is at the heart of the family and a culture is replaced by the television, the computer, and the iPod, and the state run school.

And I have hardly touched on the technocratic evolution of slavery in the form of bread and circuses gone electronic and now digital. The technology itself is only as harmless as a gun without a hand. There is little time for contemplation, or appreciation when the mind is under the constant assault of sound and visual stimulation produced to effect precut sensibilities and educate a passive intellect. The sound of a bird in the pine at dusk is unheard. The colors of dawn go unseen.

The passions of youth are now inflamed by the digital effect. Guns are fired using software imagery and sound effects by teenagers who have no clue about how to handle a real weapon much less the true damage it can produce. Computer graphics now suspends the disbelief of young minds which have barely had the chance to appreciate the simplest laws of gravity and biology.

Television raised many in my own generation more than their parents. Fortunately for us, this new media was in unpracticed hands and produced uneven results. But methods have improved. Minds can now be swayed by the crafted electronic impulses of masters.

I think, in the minds of many, the very definition of freedom has been reduced to some sort of prolonged vacation from work. As if those summer days of bliss just went on and on. But this is more than just a fantasy engaged in by corporate cogs as they turn on their wheel. It is also a small extrapolation of the same enslaved mindset, because it ignores the necessity for someone else’s labor to feed you while you lie on the beach, and it is a prophesy of continued servitude.

Freedom is not free and liberty is always dangerous. New political faiths will not save the day. A thousand million individuals, without a sound sense of their own purpose, will not save the day. A persistence of vision and a patient effort may.

An open society, one where labor is not regulated and legalized by taxation, where political dogma does not dictate the role of each individual, is a better place, but it is not a perfect world. It is simply closer to home. It is not a utopia. It is far far from any heaven. It is a human place where what you do is your responsibility, and mistakes are made and some people fail, but dreams can be made real.

The point here is that in a freer, messier, more open society, as each of us might reach that moment of inspiration which could add to the sum total of human wisdom, we might be able to act upon it, as a slave could not. Now we are on the threshold of new ways to enslave, both body and mind, and we have not yet resolved the problems of the past.

None of this ignores other realities. There are competing systems of slavery out there. The success of Western nations, even with their faults, spawns jealousy in the eyes of those who have failed to up-date their priorities. The most capable citizens of those countries will happily escape, when they can, to better their circumstances. Friction ensues.

When I think of the uncounted generations of Irish serfs (my fore-fathers) who labored on the plantations of English lords I think of all that might have been possible to them had they had the opportunity that liberty would have provided—a chance that finally came at last when they fled to the West.

Importantly, it was that very quest for some greater measure of liberty that would in the end make their new homeland that much different. And it was a quest repeated millions of times again by Germans and Chinese, by Italians and Scots, and countless others.

It seems to me that we are now losing that sense of purpose. Wanting security and safety, we are giving up our humanity as truly as any factory worker or field hand or simple slave.

The abiding hope of a slave is an end to their bondage. If we have accepted the terms of our slavery, however gentle, we will not be better off in the end. After work, there is little time or strength left for a slave to reach beyond the clasp.

Freedom may be an old idea in the mind of mankind, but the exercise of freedom is still new. After thousands of generations, we have achieved at least a small measure of liberty for all in the United States. But it is as thin as it is precious. Slavery is an older idea and well entrenched. And the forces of bondage are still with us, like the barbarian hordes that overwhelmed those small city-states which once experimented with odd ideas in Greece so long ago.

It may be poetic that a progenitor of the welfare state, Sweden, has given us a psychological term for kidnapping victims who become attached to their captors and defend them—Stockholm Syndrome. But this tag does not precisely match the sort of mass denial common in the United States and most Western countries today.

In looking for a one word definition to describe the condition of a populace which has willingly enslaved itself and refuses to admit the simple and obvious fact, the old English term ‘thralldom’ is as close to the truth as our current language permits. A ‘thrall’ is a slave. We have been enthralled by a promise of security and safety; by technology; by amusements; by a culture of personality over substance; by our very language. But we are in need of an Orwell to describe the full state of our bondage.

When art and craft are brought to a work that has that power to endure, we have the transcendent experience of stepping beyond our petty concerns into other places, in other times, and living larger lives than what we have managed by ourselves.

Not every great work is a Moby Dick, or should be. Not every reader has the stamina, or the need for the quest of a Frodo, or a picaresque journey by raft on the Mississippi. And often enough, the best of our literature is not fiction but memoir–that assembly of fact from memory that bears truth more than history.

Everyone knows that Melville’s great work was forgotten for several generations. Essentially lost but for a few libraries. That is the latent power of a great library. I imagine the moment when an unsuspecting browser happened upon that work on a shadowed shelf and wondered what the fat volume with the odd name contained—unaware at that moment that their life was about be profoundly changed.

I’ve had the experience myself more than once. As a bookseller, I’ve had that advantage. That blessing. Booksellers live small lives for the most part. We are not soldiers. We are not explorers in the physical sense. We are not often brave, despite the better example of a Henry Knox. Our pleasures are most often restrained by the limits of the octavo, the quarto, and the folio. (Melville played with us on that point, didn’t he?)

And I’ve had that great giddy moment of experience again just this past week!

There is a library in Boston which is unique to the world. It is a private library, supported wholly by its members. One of the oldest libraries in America. It’s internal architecture alone is enough to pay for a visit. But what makes it unique are its books. Every library is different in that way, of course, some more than others. Some by sheer size. Some by the quality of the collection. The Athenaeum is unique on both counts, and then some. They don’t dispose of a good book simply because no fool has stumbled upon it in a misspent lifetime or two, nor throw it away because it has been edge worn by love.

My children gave me a membership to the Boston Athenaeum for Christmas. Snow and troubles followed. The twenty-five miles or so to Boston can be a barrier in more ways than are worth recounting. The petty matters of consequence work against our best wishes. But we finally made our way there into the teeth of a nor’easter last Monday to attend a gathering of new members. Good wine and cheese were not the draw so much as guilt over not managing the visit before.

I spent most of my hours that day climbing the stairwell from floor to floor and revelling in the nooks and crannies and joy of mere proximity. So many books, so little time. You know the joke. It’s played on us.

I checked out a Ross Macdonald mystery I did not remember reading before and another title I did not know at all, just for that fact. I have been a heavy reader and a bookseller all my life and titles I don’t know practically leap from the shelves at me. This was happening repeatedly that evening to the point of making me feel even more stupid than I know I am. Macdonald was a favorite of mine in my youth and most of his titles are long out of print. But this Macdonald was not one of his best, littered with many of his sharp observations, but reduced by over-convenience in plotting and sloppy writing. The other book was worse, and quickly forgotten.

I returned to the Athenaeum on the following Friday for another assault. The quiet aisles permit unlimited skulking. I devoted myself to the third floor this time—Biography. I tried the main concourse there with its alcoves of high shelves and ladders and discovered a wonderful biography of Ambrose Bierce by his friend, Walter Neale. I read three chapters while sitting in a stuffed chair by a window over looking the ancient Granary Burying Ground. As good as it looked, I wasn’t ready for the oddities of Mr. Bierce that day. The ghosts of Sam Adams and Paul Revere lying there in the graveyard below made me think I should go after bigger fish perhaps.

I made my way up a small winding cast-iron stair to the balcony with a vague notion about Mr. Revere’s midnight ride. I have been writing about that very moment in time just recently and it would be an appropriate subject for study. But I was ambushed on my way.

Walking on the thick translucent glass floor that gives all the balconies a vague feeling of transcendence above the vaulted rooms (it’s all in the mind you see) I was struck in the eye by an oddity I could not pass without investigation: the name Norman Maclean. Didn’t he write A River Runs Through it? A nice little book. Not a favorite, for no reason I can remember. But this particular book appeared to me older than anything that Mr. Maclean from Iowa might have written. What was it?

The Former Days was published in England by Hodder and Stoughton in 1945–written by a man who had been bearing that same familiar name, but born on the Isle of Skye in 1868. He had written several novels, histories, biographies, political and religious tracts. And I had never heard of him. The third volume of this memoir, there on the shelf as well, had been published in 1952, shortly after his death. A frontispiece portrait showed a rather severe Reverend Norman Maclean in his doctoral robes. This certainly wasn’t what I was looking for. Was it?

Out of habit I turned to the first page of the first volume.

“It was called the Otter’s cave, and my first recollection of it was being taken there by my father when he set a trap to catch an otter.” Simple enough. I was caught. I stood on the glass floor and read further. By the end of the page I was in a country I have dreamed of visiting since I was a child reading Robert Louis Stevenson, and to an island I have wanted to know since—since when? I took the book down to the stuffed chair and read further. The powerful ghosts of the Granary burying ground were forgotten beside this better world of peat fires and thatched roofs and porridge.

How is a great writer forgotten? I have no clue to this mystery. Many are not given their due, but are at least kept alive by those readers who can love the finely wrought sentence and the artful word. One of my favorites, Patrick Leigh Fermor, gets a new edition every few years as the fire he has kindled with A Time of Gifts is passed from reader to reader. But perhaps this world of peat fires and open hearths is just too remote. Like Maurice O’Sullivan’s Great Blasket Island off the rocky shore of Ireland. But even O’Sullivan’s Twenty Years a’Growing has more often been kept in print.

If you Google the name Norman Maclean you get a lot about the American writer from Iowa, but you have to dig through more than a few pages to find the Scottish reverend who came home from his last posting in India during the Second World War to write down what he knew of The Former Days, a world already vanished in the cold light of new holocausts. Like Fermor, he conjures his memories with an intimacy that brings a close understanding to the reader’s mind. These were people who lived and died with your own dreams on their lips.

“It does not need a high hill to realize the joys of ascending. As you rise, how amazingly does the world grow large. The horizon recedes, and as it recedes, islands hitherto invisible rise out of the sea; new bays and lochs leap into view…In the enlarging world, the scheming of men, their toils and their quarrels, are dwarfed into insignificance. That is why the soul finds its healing in the mountains.”

And there at the top of Ben Lee, the hungry minded boy who has left his sheep to graze, has his world enlarged more than he could have imagined. “There is a cairn of rough stones, just high enough to shelter from the wind that always blows at that height. As a north breeze was blowing, I purposed sitting on the south side of the cairn, but when I got round it, there I found a woman with the wind in her hair and her tam-o’shanter in her lap, gazing at the ramparts of the Coolins. No wonder she gazed with her eyes alit, for, search the world over, you could not find a more entrancing scene. If I were astonished, the stranger was equally astonished. She wasn’t startled, for the appearance of a red-haired, freckled boy of twelve does not startle, even on a hill top.

‘Hullo! Where did you come from?’

‘The Braes.’

‘Which of the Braes?’

‘Ollach.’

‘What is your name?’

‘Norman.’

‘What else? What is your surname?’

‘Maclean.’

‘You ought to be a MacLeod with the Christian name Norman.’

‘My grandmother is a MacLeod.’

‘That explains it. This is an Island of Macdonalds, Macleods, and Mackinnons. How come you to be here and not in Mull?’

‘My father came from Coigach in Lochbroom.’

‘That is a strange place for a Maclean to be from.’

‘His grandfather escaped from Culloden and fled to the west with a companion. He settled in Coigach, and there are many Macleans there now. So my father says.’

‘Why did your father come to Skye?’

‘He is a schoolmaster.’

‘Do sit down and let us have a comfortable talk.’

I did not however sit down, but lay on a clump of heather and cupping my chin in my hands, looked up at the stranger and thought to myself that never had I seen so beautiful a woman.”

They determined that they were cousins. But he discovered more than the beauty of a woman. She found out his need for books and sent him the forbidden fruit of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Boswell’s Tour of the Hebrides.

Yes! That’s how I first discovered Skye myself. With Boswell and Johnson.

The Isle of Skye is a place on tourist maps now. The social upheavals of the highland clearances and the rote ignorance of most modernization has cleared away the crofts. But you can still visit that place, without a passport if you wish. The Reverend Norman Maclean will take you.

The book is your ship. The library is your port of departure. You may thus become the master of your fate.

But then there were choices to make. Should I pick a different subject each day or carry a theme. Should I be light or jump headfirst into those darker thoughts that plague me.

In the end I chose to write on a single theme, the death of the book, but avoid my worst nightmares for the sake of some degree of polite conversation. After it was done, I thought it came out fairly well. No loud ranting. No dead bodies.

Powell’s has kindly given me permission to repost my entries here and I have decided to put them all up at once in consecutive order.

1. The Death of the Book Is Not Exaggerated

Because I write this from Indianapolis, where I have been attending this year’s Bouchercon (the world crime and mystery fiction convention) I will begin with a bit of argument I usually save for later in my general thesis concerning the death of the book…

Sadly, most of the people attending looked like me–old and white…Okay, older, but still white. And though I know many younger readers of the mystery genre, they are the minority, and they are still white. Sitting in the audience and looking over the gray hair toward the podium where many fine authors were expounding on wonderful aspects of a genre which has been special to me since I was a teenager aspiring to be a writer myself, I could not help but be aware of the mortality of so many of these folks so devoted to their field they are willing to spend hundreds of dollars during a recession just to attend a gathering of fellow mystery lovers in this fine city with at least one great eating establishment (the Rock Bottom Brew Pub. I recommend the hickory burger and the house brown ale).

Understand, it is not their fault that they are either old, or older (I’m 62) or white. They were born that way. The problem is this: when they are gone, what then? When a new generation is raised on libraries without books, and instant news gratification, and text which is so fungible it leaks before your eyes, what then? And all this, when many cultures, not only elsewhere on this small earth, but right here in Indianapolis, have not yet even established the traditions of respect for the printed word which propelled Western culture for five centuries.

And this feeds into my greater worry–the cause which made me choose to write this series of mysteries in the first place. The book may not yet be dead, but it is mortally wounded. I have been preaching this line to deaf ears for years. The new technologies, others say, will not replace the book, but will only share the space, and enlarge it for all. Sure. Like the automobile did for the horse-drawn carriage. No. Not like that. More like the Cro-Magnon replaced the Neanderthal.

My thesis is that any such comparison does not apply. Before Gutenberg’s book, only a small elite could read–was permitted to read–and text was so expensive only the wealthy could afford the pleasure. A scare-house Halloween mirror version of this is what I fear most. After the book is gone, everyone will be able to read, but what they read and how they read will be determined by a few. A faceless few. An anonymous bureaucratic few.

I chose to write a mystery not to write a polemic about the death of the book (all part of the death of the bookshop, and the newspaper, etc), but to make a point of the mortality of this love I have for something mankind has done right amidst all the things we have gotten wrong. The book is a holy thing to me, and reading a pleasure and a gift I wish on everyone.

I have been a publisher and an editor of books and magazines. I once participated in the actual printing of a small school journal from movable type on a letterpress. I have designed pages and pasted them up. I have developed the advertising and marketing of publications. I have been a book rep traveling from city to city. And I have been a bookseller–this is the way I have earned my living for over thirty years. Now, I am a writer of a book, with others written and waiting their turn.

Not coincidentally, I chose as protagonist a ‘book hound’ whose devotion to books has afforded him a refuge and a living, whose comfort is shattered by the murder of woman–a friend and a former lover, but someone he is not sure he loved. This doubt, and the fact that he himself is both a suspect and a witness, compels him to find the cause of her death. Once shaken, he is awakened and can no longer sleep. Not to make too much of the metaphor, this is in kind with the death of the book itself. We take it for granted and assume that its blessings can be moved to a digital being. It won’t be. This wonderful device on which I write now and the magic software that makes it possible, is more fragile than any but a few are willing to recognize.

I don’t fear the Kindle or the Sony Reader, or the iPod, or any new device. They are wonderful in their own right. But we cannot let them replace the book.

There are many other worries attached to this, of course. I have been talking about this for long enough to make a few books out of it, at the very least. I will touch on a few over the next few days as I recover from my first ever convention.

2. A Practical Matter

Exaggeration is not necessary.

It was in a letter of 1897 about his cousin James Ross Clemens, that Mark Twain famously noted “the report of my death was an exaggeration.” He managed to hang on, despite his critics, for another thirteen years. Times were slower then. I suspect that the death of the book will occur more rapidly, though the small corpses will be with us for a bit longer.

What is poorly understood here is actually a very practical matter. We have lost the steel industry in America, once the largest such in the world by far, in less than forty years. That took place for very practical reasons. But if you had said such a thing was possible in 1960, you would have been looked at as a fool. And General Motors is too big to fail…right? It may not be as visible from 30,000 feet but a car trip through Detroit, or Buffalo, or any of a hundred great American industrial cities will tell you how quickly things can change.

The printing industry is just that, an industry, though miniscule by comparison to the making of steel. And this goes for publishing as well. Is there any reason for the center of publishing to remain in New York—one of the most expensive places a poor author must visit? Not now. Not in the age of the internet.

Even with a still small and captured market, the downloading of books onto Kindles and the like is already a half-priced convenience. But what will it be like in a few years. Even the machine that is a ‘reader’ will be made somewhere far far away from New York.

In an age of digital ease and the reduced ‘cost’ of those ephemeral 0’s and 1’s, can you think of a compelling reason why ‘publishers’ will promote the work of ‘authors’ who ask for too much? The need will be for product. The publicity and marketing departments have long ago assumed control of the editorial reasoning for what will be acceptable at the larger publishing houses.

Those same publishers who dominate what you can find at Walmart and Costco, (or any of the other ‘convenience’ stores that make the existence of independent book stores a daily struggle) are not in business to lose money. And like the pulp authors of the 1920’s and thirties, working in a medium which had then used technology to reduce the cost of publishing to a bare minimum, the price per word will fall even for the most popular authors. Can you tell me why those same publishers will want to keep alive a ‘format’ which they consider too expensive and too difficult to distribute relative to a nearly instant electronic impulse?

I cannot.

But I know this. That what happens to the reader engaged by the artful nuance of typography on a paper page while exploring the imagination of a single writer is not the same as the collision of visual information offered by the illusions on a digital screen.

I know this, that reading a book is an experience of human scale, not only proportioned to the hand but to the mind. It was made that way by the genius of Aldus Manutius and Wynkyn de Worde and tens of thousands of artisans and artists, writers and even editors (yes, even editors) who came after them.

And I know this. That if I find the original edition of a book, that it is at least what the author meant it to be, or nearly so in that contest between an author’s accepting payment and the need to pay for a meal or a bed. What you find on the screen is only what is convenient.

And this: those 3 ½ inch floppies you kept all that poetry on which you wrote in college won’t work on that lap top you bought last week. And what you have on that flash drive you carry on a string around your neck will be an artifact as useful as the tooth your ancestor once wore the same way.

You must understand this: everything we know as a civilization, good and bad, will soon be an ‘Aleph’ that even Borges could not imagine. And it can and will be lost in an instant.

It will be a practical matter.

3. Omnium Gatherum

In the October 17th issue of the Wall Street Journal there was a provocative piece concerning the new Kindle 2, by Stephen Marche who often writes for Esquire. In essence he accepts the revolutionary potential of the Kindle and proposes a new word, the ‘transbook,’ to describe the device and its cousins. I find the more humorous intonations of an ‘Omnium Gatherum’ to be appropriate. I suspect his optimism and suggest he has his historical facts out of order and incomplete.

Mr. Marche happily describes the moment in history when the ‘Kindle’ of another age was introduced: the codex. This wonderful device replaced the scroll–a single roll of paper–with what was essentially a bound volume of scrolls and was in fact the first true book, bringing to an end the tattered isolation of specific and shorter hand-written texts. This was revolutionary, indeed. What he fails to mention is that this was the very device which was used by authority to do away with the anarchy of the individual scroll, which might be produced by just any apostate who could write, and created the opportunity for organized sanction and approval (as well as improvement) of texts. The books of the Bible were thus codified by imprimatur. Heresy could thus be stamped out. It made the Pelagians among us very unhappy.

This was, in fact, the great and profound change that brought about the ‘dark ages.’ The authority of the Catholic Church was supreme and all dissent had to take place within the confines of its rule.

Mr. Marche recalls the monk Johannes Trithemius as a Benedictine scholar of the sixteenth century who opposed the printing press. He even compares him to our contemporary Nicholson Baker and that author’s recent rants against the Kindle and its kin. But Mr. Baker’s argument is more than just ‘the feel of the paper.’ Mr. Baker is a free man in a relatively open society who is worried over the further diminishment of his world, not its enlargement. And Trithemius was an occultist who recognized in the printing press the end of a more secretive society. His proto-Hogwarts School was an effort not only to garner knowledge but also to control it.

Mr. Marche then bemoans the heavy personal burden of accumulating individual volumes and the convenience of having 1500 titles in one relatively small device. He suggests a future where the ‘transbook’ will provide access to “all text that is non-copyright, and to the purchase of every book in and out of ‘print’” He says, “its about what the book wants to be.” It seems to me that this is the language of the true occultist, giving anthropomorphic power to a machine.

The reality is that the ‘transbook’ will be the tool of particular interests, and with particular interests. The industry that currently produces the book will fade away, at first slowly, but then at a quickening pace, as its economic underpinning are kicked away. The cost of a single printed book will rise. The convenience of downloading text will overcome reservations. Copyrights will be re-written to serve the new paradigm. And texts which do not meet the approved standards of language, or political purpose, will be neglected and unavailable.

This condition already exists to a lesser degree. First amendment protections are already being restricted for literature not in ‘book’ form. ‘Hate speech’ is proscribed and defined by standards which suit the political interest of the moment. Criticism of certain religious faiths is outlawed as ‘bigotry’. Specific words are forbidden and removed from texts. For those who agree with a given prejudice being exorcised, all is well. But the open society suffers. The great Nat Hentoff has been warning us about this for decades.

How is it that we are to avoid this bowdlerizing castration of our literature when all text is under the immediate electronic thumb of ‘authority.’

In How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman the marvelous reach of the law of unintended consequences was described. The poorest country in Europe in the Seventeenth Century was torn by the Presbyterian reformation of John Knox. In the fervor of their beliefs, the Kirk fathers wanted every man, woman, and child to learn to read and thus have direct access to the word of God. Overlooked was a related consequence, having learned to read, every man, woman, and child would be able to read anything they chose. Within a hundred years Scotland was the richest country in Europe, and the home of thinkers who had spawned a revolution in America and were creating the industrial revolution in Britain. Could this great awakening work now in reverse as all books are contained in a single dispenser?

Never mind the impermanence of costly devices which will be outmoded within a few years, or the restrictions of software intended to meet restrictive purposes. I would have far more confidence in the future of the e-book if it were guaranteed the same freedom of the press as the printed book. Sadly, political forces are already active on the behalf of special interests. The new money is on the Kindle, and this too leaves me in doubt.

4. Apple picking

And then we have the op-ed by Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, in the October 9th New York Times, which praised and defended the concept of Google Books—essentially the planned digital access to all the world’s literature. I recommend anyone interested in the subject of books, copyrights, and the integrity of text to read it.

I read his comments with horror and began immediately to write an essay on the subject for my own website. Sadly, I would wager that at the very least, nine out of ten people who read Mr. Brin’s editorial will think that his efforts are for the good and offer a whole new future for the written word.

A few weeks ago I stood in a grassy field where I had been picking apples while a major book illustrator paged through his portfolio of dozens of successfully published covers and hundreds of projects. His portfolio was in his hand on a device made by Apple. He also had the text of the books he had illustrated there as well, and numerous reference works he had made use of.

How could I not be impressed by this wizardry held in the palm of a hand? Well, let’s see…Perhaps I should highlight a few things Mr. Brin said in his article.

After mentioning Cornelius Walford’s account of the destruction of great libraries through the centuries, he said, “I hope such destruction never happens again.” Ironically, and I believe unintentionally, Mr. Brin’s previous and current efforts are part of the actual destruction of millions of books right now. Today. This minute. Libraries from coast to coast are ridding themselves of their troublesome books and replacing them with machines and software. The good intentions aside, all of that machinery and software will be obsolete within ten years. I know that as an historical fact. I cannot now access things I wrote on my Mac ten years ago.

Additionally, one might ask, what is the software platform which will be mandated to access Google’s efforts? But that would be picky and perhaps offensive to the software engineers at Microsoft.

And, given the rights to the world’s literature, will Google be writing off the enormous cost of their effort and giving equal access to all other search engines? Not likely. Mr. Brin even says as much while suggesting that by leading the way, Google will be making it easier for others to follow. I suppose,.. if you have a spare billion to spend.

Mr. Brin refers to “a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores” as a ‘black hole.’

Funny, I never noticed I was in a black hole all those years of my life spent at Avenue Victor Hugo Books, my small shop.

Mr. Brin does not even attempt to touch on the greater issues. Who will choose the works to be available? China, for instance, has already made it clear they will not permit access to what they do not like. Access is limited in all Arabic speaking countries. Who will oversee the texts? How will you know what you see is what the author wrote? Where will you go to check the text?

And something more, as alluded to here in a previous posting: is reading a Kindle the same as reading a book? Does the mind approach the electronic page with the same sensibilities? I can answer that by way of a personal note. I have arthritis in two fingers (having been a two-finger typist from childhood). I can no longer use a mechanical typewriter, despite my fondness for the machines themselves. More importantly though, I can say without doubt the way I write has been dramatically altered. I even think differently about the way I construct a sentence. Simply put, the ease of choice made in the instant as one writes has altered the way a writer crafts his work.

I don’t wish to be totally negative at this moment of small triumph for myself. I have beside me my own first book! But these larger matters have already affected my life, and they will be with us for all the years of my children, and their children.

Every age encompasses the end of another and the seeds of the next. That is exactly what my novel HOUND is about. It is most importantly about a final moment in human history, but it is also asking what is to come after. The old world, in all its aspects, has been my life. But Henry Sullivan, my protagonist, is younger than I am and thus is straddling that cusp. This story and those which follow are about a book hound, a man who finds good books–as I see him in my mind, a sort of knight errant and this series of mysteries as his sallying forth to do battle on behalf of the things he loves.

I am not Henry Sullivan. He is far smarter and braver than I have ever been. His worse limitation is that he only knows what I know. Thus he has quite a task ahead. He must first come to understand the threat his world faces. Then he must find out why. And then he must do something about it.

Understanding the threat that Mr. Brin poses to the life of the book is obvious. What can be done about it is not. Certainly technology will move in the direction of demand. The usefulness of the Apple iPod is just as obvious, and the demand is terrific. Finding a viable place for the book in a world of instant amusement will be difficult. But that is my purpose.

Now I have a book of my own. And if I can entertain a few more readers for a little while longer and thereby keep my world alive, I will be very pleased with what I’ve done. But I will not be satisfied with that.

5. Truth and Consequences

The challenge of making my case in these five short blogs is magnified for me because I am both a slow talker and thinker. I tend to work toward my thoughts in an ‘organic’ manner. That’s probably why I chose the form of the novel for expression. I am not easily seduced by sound bites.

The first line of my novel, HOUND was hidden until my editor pointed out the old newspaper adage that I was burying my lead. Yet it was that first line that had spawned the whole book and had always been the nucleus of the way I was going to approach my larger subject.

Books are, after all, the way I make my living.

It is a matter of our age that most of us refuse to deal with unpleasantness until we are forced to. There are so many alternatives. Buy a new one. Eat out. Watch TV. Download it…A significant number of my fellow citizen live their lives between a pair of headphones. It’s damn hard to hear the screaming that way.

We have thrown off the clothes of tradition and taken up the amusements of our age. Neal Postman warned about the consequences of this in Amusing Ourselves to Death, many years ago.

I was not surprised in the 1990’s to discover that my worries over the death of the book were dismissed out of hand by most people. What occurred to me then was that the whole process of recognition would be either organic or catastrophic. Nothing in-between. Now that the dying has begun, what I hear is denial. It won’t be so bad. You won’t feel a thing.

Telling people over and again that the levees are inadequate, that money to fix them is being misspent on other things, and that history has predicted a direct hit by another hurricane in the foreseeable future, is not enough, though homes and lives and the life’s work of hundreds of thousands are at risk. Afterward there will be many to blame. But there will be very few who admit, “I knew, but I did nothing.”

It is your right to go in a candy shop and spend all your pay on sweets. It is your right to put the work of your life on a flash drive. I am not asking for or wanting any government to tell you or me how to live our lives. What I am wanting is for as many people as possible to take responsibility for themselves and what they do. I don’t want my children to bear the consequences of a society which has lost its head. Go ahead, buy the candy if that’s important to you. But please don’t turn then to your government to correct your health problems because that cost will then fall on me and mine and I do not deserve the burden. I am certain I have made enough mistakes all my own to bear.

Dependency on the convenience of the internet is not a good thing. Yes, it will be a wondrous good to have all of the world’s fine literature (and the trash too) at your fingertips as Google wishes. But if you stop making choices—if you stop buying the actual book which represents your own judgment about what is fine, there will be no true arbiter of taste. There will be no true arbiter of value to separate the fine from the trash.

The book must share space in the rooms of our lives. We must make that judgment in numbers sufficient to keep the book alive and viable as an art form, and a business, with all the craft and industry behind it. What I fear at first is neglect. No one wants to do harm. But later, when the cost of the book has risen too far above the expense of the simple download, all that will be left is the kind of ‘print-on-demand’ that will homogenize and pasteurize every nuance of the arts and crafts of publishing. And with them will inevitably go content.

Already typography and binding have suffered.

I haven’t the scientific background to instruct others on the fragile nature of the internet, but I fully comprehend the consequences of what I have read and been told by those who do. For instance, the effect of a single electromagnetic pulse weapon above New York would end most modern communication in America.

I could ask, “How are your letter writing skills? Penmanship anyone? And is the Post Office up to the challenge of physically carrying all that love texting today.”

But that is not the point. Doomsday is not the real matter at hand. Such warnings will be ignored, just as we have ignored them so many times in the past. The truth is that whether or not any catastrophe ever befalls us, we will have lost a great tool of civilization.

The book is the record of what we are. And this medium does not occur in nature. It is just as artificial as the iPod. It is a product of the human imagination. And just as the iPod is the end product of a thousand smaller technologies without which it could not exist, the book too will go away if the infrastructure that makes it possible is neglected.

The record of what we are should not be left in the hands of a few. Just as the codex took the place of the ancient scroll and thus permitted authority to assume control over what we should know, the internet and its offspring are liable to central management. They will have their own purposes in mind, whether their hearts are good or bad.

We must take care.

We have several generations of this sort of tripe polluting the academic mind at this point. I am 62. I was first introduced to a supposed sexual subtext of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ when I was 16–in a high school class no less. The joke is that such pseudo-intellectual claptrap is still being foisted on new generations of sixteen year olds as if it is recent revelation. The Victorians are still being challenged as if they are ‘the Man,’ in the same way as Nazi’s are still the villains in so many movies after sixty years of Pol Pots and Stalins, Idi Amins and Che Guevaras, Mao Zedongs and a dozen other mass murderers more relevant to the current world scene.

And Holden Caulfield is still rebelling against the hypocrisy of his parent’s generation, appealing to every petty impulse of the average teenager instead of to the best that is clearly in him and them. Meanwhile, the social contract which makes it possible for us to diddle with such foolish self-indulgence is being vandalized, graffitied, and sacrificed on political alters of phony fear and trumped-up emergencies.

Whooh! Take a breath.

That said, there are a great many wrongs in ‘modern’ literature and far too few rights: style superseding substance, shock replacing awe, politics trumping philosophy, and characters who seem unaware of consequences, just for starters.

Any study of epidemiology will tell you that the suffering and death of millions, year upon year, was common until the Twentieth Century. The way humankind compensated was constant procreation. Culture was based on the making of babies and the training of children to assume the tasks necessary to provide for the welfare of the next generation of babies. As Mr. Hobbes famously observed, life was indeed nasty, brutish and short. By the end of the Eighteenth Century, after almost six thousand years of poorly recorded human history, and despite the Renaissance, The Reformation, the Golden Age of Islam, the Roman Empire, the Glory of Greece and four thousand years of Egyptian and Chinese dynasties, there was one lone democracy on the face of the earth and fifteen percent of its population were slaves and half of its citizens were unqualified to fully own property much less vote. The 99 percent of the rest of the earth’s humanity lived in poverty and squalor punctuated by war. Chattel slavery was such a common condition it was unremarkable except in a few European countries and in the newly minted United States.

Along comes the Nineteenth Century, the prosperity of the industrial age, and the blossoming of democracy. Oh, those terrible Victorians. So repressed. So hypocritical! Kings were deposed. Slavery abolished or relegated to the darkest outposts. A middle class comprising more than half of the population assumed power over this country and a few others where the arts flourished in an open market beyond the thumb of patronage. Life spans doubled. Disease became a matter of infrequent epidemic instead of annual attrition. The sciences established a foundation for the proof and furthering of knowledge. Women gained legal standing. And in the midst of this, the first utopians imagined a lost Eden when men freely frolicked with the beasts and cries of woe were heard for the ‘better times’ when the water was sweet.

It can be argued that the anti-hero was first born in the Victorian Age. Our markers for the centuries are not calibrated exactly to human progress. For that matter it could be argued that Tom Jones or Hamlet were proto-anti-heroes. But the anti-hero does not become a literary ‘type’ until the Twentieth Century. And what is he rebelling against? What is his bête noire? Why…hypocrisy! After six thousand years of throat-slitting and abject misery, our anti-hero is offended by hypocrisy! Oh. Woe. And what is the bane of his unhappy existence? Sexual codes of conduct. And note–please note–that he is a ‘he,’ not a ‘she.’ His much sought and exercised pleasure is in the free sowing of his seed like any good barbarian, without care of consequence–let the wench take care of the bastard.

The phallacy of modern literature is just that–the replacement of the sword with the male member. Good and evil? Bah humbug. Evil is relative, but my sword–oh my.

This is no feminist ranting. I have as little interest in the prejudices and bigotry of feminism as I do for most politics and religion. My first impulse is to look at the purpose of such things. My interest is in literature. People who exercise their lungs with slogans have little time to read. My worry is that the hero–that singular literary creation of pre-historic mankind, who led us through myth and saga from the cowering in caves to the footprint on the moon has been killed, not by an arrow in the heel, but by ignorance and willful neglect. My own fear is that the hero, that imperfect glory, has been made petty by the comic book. My observation is that the ambiguous and the enigmatic have become the drugs of choice to a culture which has no clear idea of the risks we face.

Achilles was not a heel. He was imperfect, but he faced his enemies without fear and met his duty. Tragedy was the result of flaw, and the lesson to us all about hubris and fallibility. This is now to be scoffed at. The hero is a joke. Human weakness can no longer be the cause of tragedy, because our flaws are all that is important in an age of anxiety and self-approval. We all know we are weak. Narcissism is rampant. Duty is relative–is there time for a latte? Sex is what runs the city, not genius. Comedy is the natural province of mankind.

A man saves the lives of a plane-load of people, drawing upon the learned skill and determination of a life-time of dedication to being as good as he can be–and the reporter says “well, he was just trying to save himself,” and another wonders if he is a good husband–intimating that, because he is a pilot, and all pilots are jockeys, that he might have something going with one of the flight attendants.

Freud is the god of our times. His misanthropic, misbegotten mistakes have become the assumed wisdom of a sniggering class of pseudo-intellectuals. Word-choice and onomatopoeia aside, we are dealing with life and death here. Our Literature is an expression of the soul of our age. Are you pleased to have nuclear and biological weapons in the hands of leaders who trade in ambiguous ideas and enigmatic gesture?

Another way to view this: is it more important to you that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, or that he authored the Declaration of Independence? You may answer the former if you like, but you would be wrong. Another slave owner in an age of slavery is no matter to you now. But the fact that you can worry over the question today is a result of Mr. Jefferson’s better nature.

Who our heroes are is important. Understanding heroes and that they may have weaknesses, and that they are human beings different from ourselves only by their own sense of purpose, is a key element in the chemistry of culture. Do you want a Thomas Jefferson to consider the consequences of war, or a George Bush? This is not political but practical. I am sure you can be a Republican and still understand the mediocrity of George Bush. Just as I think you might be a Democrat and question the experience and wisdom of a community organizer from the wards of Chicago. But we have chosen these men as our leaders in times of worry. We will pay the consequences.

After all, I am asking if our literature has contributed to this state of affairs. Can we afford the rule of the anti-hero?

But all behaviorists are not so insane or inane. Their foundational methods are actually scientific and their discoveries can be enlightening. It is usually when they begin to extrapolate from mice to men that they go terribly wrong. Such pseudo-scientific theory is so 20th Century!

So I listened to my friend and found his proposition very appealing and immediately began to self-consciously wonder why. Why?

The idea was this: people are predisposed to religion. Imagining a god comes naturally. During human evolution, it was the creature who could look at the ripple of the tall grass and imagine it was a tiger who more often survived. The other creature, the one who dismissed the ripple of the grass as simply the play of the wind, more often became lunch for a hungry feline. Thus, the creature who could imagine monsters in the dark more likely lived long enough to procreate while the one who decided to go out and get more firewood because it was getting chilly added himself to some other creature’s menu. Thence, apparently, the proto-human who imagined Thor in the lightening laid low while the fool who tried to finish gathering his mushrooms got zapped.

Why would this be appealing to me? It is because of my prejudices as a writer. I like to imagine things. I wonder about tigers in the grass–if not ticks. I will see ships in the clouds before I will worry about rain. Not being religious, I must consider this tit-bit of behaviorism for what it’s worth.

I do believe in evolution–whether divinely inspired or not. If it was God who gave me this brain and these five senses, I imagine he expected me to make good use of them. I am bored by ideas of predestination, behaviorist or otherwise. They assume a great deal of patience on the part of any god who must wait for the inevitable outcome. Or they might assume a static universe, but such a place would have no use for living matter, human or not. Hard-wired creatures would quickly be reduced to their carbon-based elements.

I am excited and thrilled to observe the minor evolutions which occur before my very eyes. I have witnessed a little egg and flour become a pancake worthy of any god. And I have imagined the wonder of Beethoven’s neighbor as he listened to that mad deaf man trick the Fifth Concerto from his badly tuned piano. Behaviorism is as silly as most politics because it assumes the most banal conclusion from the most proscribed evidence.

I have long engaged the idea that small things can be the most revealing of larger circumstances. That is, after all, the nature and progress of a single human life. Few of us have the opportunity to grab the pole beneath the flag as it rises on Mt. Suribachi or sit at the table and place our signature on Mr. Jefferson’s folly.

The importance of small things for a writer is that there are more of them and thus more to choose from. An imagined story needs the fuel of imagined fact. Readers must believe that such facts might be true, or else loose interest. If every matter is historically momentous, the weight of it might be endured if the purpose is large enough, but it will more often be read as shear fantasy. Why? Because our lives are more often tossed by the weather than a nuclear holocaust. Fiction must engage the reader’s mind by establishing the reality of a lie.

Because I imagine a Jefferson might arise from any quarter, I do not ignore such larger purpose in fiction, but I am more engaged by the circumstance from which a Jefferson might come, than by the supposing of a Jefferson himself. I am prone to wonder at the talent of the slave who fashioned Jefferson’s writing box as much as I am the mind of the inventor himself. Why? Because I imagine that slave’s skill as a carpenter might have inspired Mr. Jefferson to conjure the outlandish supposition that all men are created equal. And also because human history is much more about the slave who survived than it is about the master–slavery being the common place of most human beings until our own time, after all.

How did that human slave muster the spirit to get up in the morning and apply his talent to Mr. Jefferson’s toy? Was it merely because of the prospect of a better meal than the field hand? I suspect not. And I imagine the creature who went out to find the firewood at night did not freeze to death but did find some addition company to join him by his fire. And the fool who finished gathering his mushrooms had something to entice a potential mate with–a dinner for two, by fire light no less.

Obviously I don’t read many comic books. The saving of the earth by super-human powers is no more enjoyable to me than any theatrical deus ex machina. If a god can save us he will, or else what’s a god for? And I imagine that the matters that matter most are those which we might know in our lives rather than what we can only imagine. This is not a circular thought. It is a road through the tall grass. It is a forge on which a sword might be fashioned which makes the tiger shy away.

But I do see the god in the machine. I see the machine made by the same human imagination that feared tigers in the tall grass. The behaviorist might conjure his own circumstance in the lab for that ancient human being who once saw the slag in the fire pit and supposed a use for the metal that became the sword that killed the tiger in the grass. That ancient might have thanked his god for the vision he saw in the fire-pit. Or he might have declared himself the village chief.

I don’t know.

I should note that I was not always on his side. There was a vein of tragedy that ran through his work that chilled me deeper than I could find words to describe or easily cope with. When I was younger, this bleak awareness was off-putting and somehow unacceptable. But as I grew older I found an empathy for it, if not sympathy, and finally had the pleasure of re-discovery that comes when you take a fresh look at something you have taken for granted. (I have always accepted the judgment that his father’s death while crossing those railroad tracks at Chadds Ford with Andrew’s nephew Newell in 1945 was the key to that dark core. David Michaelis, who once worked at our bookshop, wrote a fine biography of N.C. Wyeth and touched on some of this.)

Lately, I have been driving south from Boston to carry my son and all his gear to and from college twice a year, and one of my daughters is working in that direction now as well, so I have good cause to stop by the wonderful Brandywine River Museum at Chadds Ford in passing and see the work of the Wyeth clan up close. It would be well worth the effort without the convenient excuse. And it is on those journeys that I have been able to come to terms with many of my previous reservations.

I have favorites: “Roasted Chestnuts,” “Cape Coat,” “Faraway,” “Snow Hill,” “Trodden Weed,” and many more. He made prolific use of his 91 years. Each time I have finally seen the original of a reproduction I liked before, I am enthralled.

My purpose here, certainly an extension of the arguments I have engaged in the past, is to say outright that Wyeth was the greatest artist of my time, and one of the greatest of any time–in easy company now with Rembrandt, Velasquez, and Caravaggio. The great pleasure of intimate exposure to his work at the Brandywine has made me understand this. And this awareness has, in turn, transferred itself to a personal sense of hope at a time of waning expectations. The world will not devolve into a primitive state of universal slavery–at least not without a fight.

Perception is the cutting edge of awareness and thus of life. We are numbed if not deadened by the humdrum of necessity. Our perceptions are dulled by repetition and order. The artist becomes the agent provocateur, the translator, the proxy, nay the Cyrano to our Christian in our appreciation of life.

Wyeth is reported to have said, “I put this pink tone on her shoulder–and it almost blew me across the room.” Our eyes are fixed by a simple color and thus by the twisted figure in the grass and thus a world we would not otherwise know.

The spirit of great art is not just the individual perception of the world but the statement that such unique perception is important and necessary. When this creative act is carried out within an established cultural context which is hostile to an individual artist’s nature, it is often the catalyst to even greater work. This was the case of Rembrandt who was both trapped and financed by the Burghers of Holland. Velasquez was a slave to Royal Hapsburg whim and yet he found space for his art within the lines of the Inquisition. Caravaggio existed at the very fringe of Papal indulgence, and yet found the means to express his own visions.

Andrew Wyeth survived as great a challenge as any of those three. Indeed, the stamp of conformity in our media driven age is enough to steal the breath from any lesser artist. Wyeth was born into a century dominated by arbiters who despised such individual expression. Picasso was their man–intimacy replaced by pornography, color abused in an absence of nature, anarchy of line because discipline might reveal a specific awareness.

Wyeth was accused of realism. Oh my God! How could he! Regionalism! How quaint. Popularity without the sanction of authority. Inexcusable! Accessibility. Ridiculous! His sins against the church of modernism are too many to count, much less countenance.

He worked in egg tempera, a medium which would have been appreciated by any great artist of the 17th Century, but beyond the patience of post-modernism or post anything. He looked at his subject again and again, for years if necessary, until he was satisfied. He understood the subtle play and betrayal of light that is invisible to the digital palette. He listened to his subject as he worked, something lost to art students with their ears clasped by headphones. This was part of his unique ability to awake all the senses through the single faculty of sight. Wyeth’s art was not an accident. His work was a discovery, first for himself, and then, through his genius, for us.

His personal life was nobody’s business but his own. The relationship of an artist to his subject is only important through what is revealed on the canvas. Bathroom habits are irrelevant to anyone but a plumber. It is perhaps interesting that his personal life even mattered to the People magazine crowd–but of course, that is a measure of his impact on a greater audience otherwise unmoved by what they had been instructed to believe was art in our times.

I found it interesting that so many news reports of his passing in January used the words “controversial artist.” There was no true controversy–no debate that could engage the intellect in any case. Wyeth’s art was his own, unarguably, and yet an unintentional affront to the shabby aesthetics of our hollow and inflated age. At the end, he was peerless.

My younger brother re-introduced me to McPhee in the early 1990′s. My brother is a geologist and was taken with several of those works which border on that territory, as well as the one on Alaska if I remember correctly. I had only read one of McPhee’s books at the time, the Deltoid Pumpkin Seed–brought to it by my own interest in lighter than air vehicles–and was not yet enamored with the man’s work. McPhee was a bit too cool on a subject that was hot to me.

We sold many of McPhee’s works at my bookshop over the years and I was well aware of the steady interest he seemed to bring even though his subject matter ranged from basketball and canoes, to oranges. I suppose I had dismissed him for his range of interest and assumed, if he wrote about so many things, he could write about none of them very well. That, of course, would have been true of a lesser writer.

Like all good writers, McPhee focuses on the individual human story and through them reveals the larger context. Thus, he is truly exploring the same territory again and again–human character. The geomorphology of the stone serves only as a stage.

The book that changed my judgment on McPhee was Rising from the Plains. This is just one part of a fine quartet which includes Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, and Assembling California. All of these were gathered together in the Pulitzer Prize omnibus Annals of a Former World in 1998. You won’t have qualified for a degree in geology when you have completed the course, but you will know better of the earth on which you stand. And more importantly, you will grasp a good portion of the geography of the human heart.

What quickly captured my eye with Rising from the Plains, a study of the earth we call Wyoming, was Ethel Waxham, “a slim young woman who is not in any sense a geologist,” as she “steps down from a train in Rawlings, Wyoming, in order to go north by stagecoach into country that was still very much the Old West. She arrived in 1905, when she was twenty-three. Her hair was so blond it looked white. In Massachusetts, a few months before, she had graduated from Wellesley College, and had been awarded a Phi Beta Kappa key, which now hung around her neck. Her field was classical studies. In addition to her skills in Latin and Greek, she could handle a horse expertly…” and shoot a rifle accurately and her aim was to teach school at a one-room outpost of civilization in a land of winds so great they spread the meager soil all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.

Another favorite book of mine is The Virginian, by Owen Wister. That phenomenal bestseller is a far better piece of literature than most academics have taken the time to appreciate (or Hollywood has bothered to remake). It is cursed by its phenomenal success–the unwashed public liked it, so how can it be good. And, perhaps worse, it is a progenitor of all the Western novels which have shaped our concept of the American West to this day. That is the connection which found its way in my brain back in the 1990′s. Could Ethel Waxham have been inspired by the heroine of The Virginian, first published in 1902 and so popular about the time that she was studying the classics in Northampton? What inspired this young woman to go west to that same territory and take up her profession? Had literature once again not only reflected the world but in so doing, changed it?

McPhee teaches writing at Princeton University, and I would love to have studied with him, but I must settle for what I can learn from his books. I can tell you a little of what I have found there, and have tried to learn: Patience–if the story is there it will rise to the surface by the force of nature beneath it; Observation–the study of a subject is not in the notions you bring to it but in the revelation of the interior; Choice–all the facts are there by the million, and too many to catalog, so what you report should be true also to the nature of what you must leave behind; and Manner–style is overrated in our time, while manner is overlooked. The manner of telling of a story is the secret that opens the reader’s mind.

The guide John McPhee chose for his expedition through time was David Love, a wise and observant professional geologist born and raised on the land to be studied. But it is in David Love’s own past that we discover our reason to care about this particular place.

I have not yet read the journals of Ethel Waxham. These are published now and I will read them soon. She is a stunningly beautiful writer. Hers is the spring water from which the story in Rising from the Plains grows. Hers is the fragile human element that finds its root in the rock and splits it, inexorably, to be viewed by us in the comfort of our chairs. Just the portions excerpted by McPhee in his own book have left me with a sort of hero worship. I cannot forget her story.

Recently I began a total re-write of the third novel in the Hound series. What I had written in previous drafts did not yet capture the story I wanted to tell. In this task I had my erstwhile hero, Henry Sullivan, a fellow who has managed to find a unique life in his own appreciation of books, extolling the virtues of McPhee’s work. I decided to take a chance and re-read my reference, and was suddenly captured by McPhee and his subject once again.

This is not always a wise move. Re-reading favorite books can be painful. Especially when the work was first encountered when we were young. But it has been less than twenty years sense my first judgment, and I bargained with the fact that I had changed less in that time than in the twenty years before.

As usual, I was wrong. I found myself moved more by the second reading than the first. I don’t want to go too far in explaining why I think this is so at this time in my life. The human comedy is always a laugh at our own expense. And though the reason for this web site is a discussion of my work, the greater and lesser purpose I have for that work, and the values which I believe inform it, I am not sure all the ingredients in the sausage should be revealed. Thank goodness there is no FDA yet for writers.

At some point I will re-write and post an appreciation of a very different author, Tom Wolfe. How great writing can be so different while drawing on the same elements is a magic worthy of many more essays, but here I would simply commend for your attention the work of John McPhee. I think especially Rising From The Plains, as my personal favorite, but take your pick. Take time. Be patient.

The importance of the word to me lay in the sudden self-awareness that others had wrestled with the amoebic edges of memory and found a word for a phenomenon I was already encountering. We often exchange actual and original purpose or intent with a better cause when we recall our actions. Price may have been the determining factor and money the motive for accepting the price, but it was, after all, the perfect gift, was it not?

I have in my mind an endless string of word associations. For example, ‘cannot’ immediately brings up a young Laurie Saunders and an intense dissection of the use of that word versus the two words ‘can not.’ Whatever the disagreement, I am sure Laurie was correct. Her sense of language was superb and I depended on her more than she knew to spot usage problems in our magazine, Galileo.

The staff was all-volunteer. We were attempting to publish a nationally distributed and competitive magazine in the genre field of science fiction, without a dime more in pocket than we could gather to pay the printer. Authors were paid out of incoming revenue from sales.

In the end, it was only our inability to pay the printer (due to other underestimated or uncalculated problems) that kept our last issue from appearing. Revenue dropped abruptly like turning off the water in a hose. Most of the fine authors in that last unpublished issue never saw payment to compensate them for all the angst of awaiting to see their words on the page. All of this is a common enough story with countless small publishers.

Another disagreement with the estimable Laurie centered on my happy use of prepositions at the end of sentences. She was much attached to the Latin rule, and I to the more common convenience. And yet another quarrel concerned the uses of ‘that’ and ‘which.’ Anyone reading my work now will quickly see the issue on display to this day.

My memories of those times when we throve (a fabulous word) on pizza and words are complicated by my own addiction to what I wanted versus what was. The drug that made it possible for us to do what we did in the hours after we had already done a days work to pay the rent and pizza bill, was a confluence of individual dreams brought to focus on a specific goal. Again a common enough story–given to baseball teams and revolutionaries. The cocaine of dreams will often shape otherwise mundane incident.

It is impossible for me to argue that what we did in those small offices was of any more importance than the pleasure of doing it. At the time I wanted to change the paradigm (another nice word.) Publishing as a whole was controlled by a very few companies and science fiction per se was in the hands of the same small group of once young visionaries who had re-established the field after World War Two. There seemed to be an opportunity there to inflict my own philosophies on the world.

I am now, as I was then, a devotee of storytelling. Much of what was published in the field of science fiction was more intent on the explication of some new scientific titbit in the context of a western in outer space or a political diatribe. I love political diatribe, you understand, but not before breakfast.

What was passing for ‘new’ in the 1970′s was the psychology based nihilism of the 1930′s brought forward with little attempt to rethink the proposition–mankind was evil and stupid. I personally did not know anyone who was evil and reading about stupid people never seemed like a good use of my time, so I rejected this school of science fiction out of hand.

I wanted to publish stories in Galileo about human beings facing imagined problems of the future that were entertaining as well as enlightening of the present. It’s what I thought storytelling was all about.

I will not speak for the purposes of Charles Ryan, Floyd Kemske, Tom Owen, or any of the others who joined me in the cause. Their dreams were each unique to themselves. As the erstwhile ‘publisher,’ I certainly managed to have my say more than anyone, but Charles Ryan, in his role as editor, easily had as much influence. The final product achieved each time a new issue appeared was a common effort.

I am just as certain, if each member of the staff were asked today what their purpose was, that each answer would be essentially different. Some of the same words might be employed but the heart of the answer would beat its own tune. And I am also positive that what each of us would say would be remarkably different than what we might have said at the time. That’s where fungibility comes in. Without a lie, we can individually interpret our actions faithfully to meet the value of that past in each of us.

The interest to me of this is this: the faithfully remembered past is not wrong simply because it presents an alternate gathering of attributes or characteristics–and most especially if it presents an exchange of color, or size or time of day. These last items are mundane ‘fact.’ Their importance is purely relative to the object. And this is the grammar of memory. It may be important that the tree was big, but likely unimportant that the tree was seventy-six and a half feet tall. A preposition may dangle at the end of a sentence, but it works if it gives the reader what for.

Memory is fungible because it must be. We must have the freedom to re-interpret the past to ourselves because at the moment of the original occurrence, it’s likely our minds were on other things–sex, food, money, or something even more important (?). What we do is often simply achieved by the momentum of our lives. We set our course and then eat lunch. Why we chose to accept one manuscript and not another, each of some arguable value, might have been a matter of indigestion. Whole empires have been lost for as little as that. Must we then judge ourselves for our dyspepsia? I think not.

Our lives are an accumulation. A stew. A gumbo. Hodgepodge. Gallimaufry. (Aren’t words great!) We are the cooks and it is not so presumptuous to say we are the ‘chefs’ of even such humble food as we might in the end serve.

Our efforts to direct our lives becomes with age, a task of editing. There is no time left to relive the details of our intentions, much less the minutia of our actual accomplishments.

It is now my convenient prejudice that the older we get, the better we remember.

I imagine the death will be mourned much like that of a rich uncle whose testament has yet to be read. The gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts will not occur until later, when it is discovered that Uncle Octavo has squandered his fortune in recent years and there is nothing left for his various relatives or wives, much less his children, legitimate or not.

Let us look at the evidence.

There have been many articles of late on the coming of the electronic book. Mr. Johnson very wisely proffers some more subtle forensics, but most of the others have the gosh-wow of a kid in the 1920′s who has built his first crystal-radio. Oh, how the world will change! And I would hasten to add, the world did not change enough to keep that kid off the beaches at Normandy in 1944.

The first new new internet was the system of canals that enlarged our lives starting around the 1820′s. By that time, mankind had traveled on roads by foot, wagon, and coach for many thousands of years–roughly at the speed of conversation from ear to ear. One terrific change caused by the canal was the rise of New York City publishing at the hub of a new age. Railroads came along shortly after–much like wi-fi has followed cable–and increased the importance of New York as the intellectual center of the universe.

Electricity brought with it the genius of the telegraph, the teletype, then the telephone. The radio was quickly overshadowed by the television. Through all of this, the book maundered the results. Gatsby played his phonograph, the literati danced, while in the alcove by the potted palm, Prufrock, martini in hand, warned of the hollowing of mankind. And, nearby, the butler could be seen with a candlestick entering the library.

The threads which held the bindings through the centuries have been pulled in favor of a cheaper glue. The sturdy cloth covers that replaced the extravagance of leather have now become mere cardboard. The paper of the text itself is re-cycled–acid free and ready to be recycled again. All of it is disposable now. Books warp and buckle on the shelf without being read or even handled.

And what of the contents in the library safe? The jewelry is paste–mostly post-modern costume artifacts. Words are now adjusted to suit the occasion. If a word bothers you, it can be banned. If an author does not stay on topic, he won’t get a slot on the talk show.

It is time for the e-book.

It’s time that the author be dethroned in any case. Who are they, after all? Just products of their time. Their words might well have been spoken by any other. Their ideas are borrowed, are they not? They are just the latest product of an imperfect educational system. Where they differ, it is only a matter of prejudice.

It is time for the e-book.

Truth is only relative. Offending passages can be digitally removed. ‘Facts’ can be enhanced to suit the moment. And who will be the judge of that? Or is it just that–the truth has no relatives.

Who will save the Earth from these troublesome books? Recycle them!

It is time for the e-book. Have you got one yet? It can be read on the subway, or at the park. All the books in the world are in your hand. All the intellectual power of Rome! No need for libraries. No need for bookshops. No need, in fact, for books.

Technology has triumphed. No longer is the screen bleached by the brilliance of the sun…But neither is it graced by the glimmer of quiet revelation as the eye meets the word in ink on a page.

Mr. Steven Johnson refers to the book as “dark matter.” Yes! Precisely. The tens of millions of books that have shaped our culture will now be burned into pixels of light.

Mr. Johnson is clearly smitten with his toy, but importantly he has paused to ask some questions. His wariness is perhaps caused by a glance at the toys of yesteryear filling the back of his closet shelves.

As the great Google digitalizes text and makes each passage of Moby Dick available sentence by sentence, and word by word, what place will be left for Ishmael? Will Isaac be the only survivor instead? Choose your own text, and Melville be damned.

Mr. Johnson notes: “Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article–sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.”

Willy Loman might have warned, “Attention must be paid.” But with attention spans being reduced to a mere click, is it necessary to read the part about the whaling industry? Can’t I just go right to the good parts? Are you bored yet?

Will writers write so that readers can play tag with the gems and ignore the settings? The heroin of one climax after another will make the marijuana of Proust rather passe, don’t you think? Or is there time to think when there are so many links to follow? The great Google will lead us to an answer.

And when the electricity fails and the lights go out, what? Was the candlestick to hold a candle, or to bludgeon?

I think the decision was tied to an example of foolishness which is worth re-considering: that it would be easier to write a juvenile–to break the ice before getting on to the harder stuff.

The common belief is that childhood is blessed by simplicity. Things were easier then. But this is quite false, of course. We all know that, if we know anything. But we want to believe it for reasons which are themselves complex.

Childhood is the most difficult period of a human life. There is more to learn in less time with fewer skills to use on the way.

A successful childhood is almost a guarantee of a happier adulthood. There is a reason why an adult revisits childhood memories so constantly no matter how many years have intervened. Those first sparks of knowledge become our stars.

And there is a reason why the sociopath has such difficulty with such thoughts. The despoiling of childhood is just as nearly a guarantee of an unhappy adult. Thousands of psychologists make a good living off those results.

Offer a Latin phrase to an average person in a key situation…Say, ‘Post hoc ergo propter hoc.’ Nine out of ten will stare blankly at you. This is what being a child is like. Uncomfortable. Should you know that? Perhaps embarrassing. Are you stupid for not knowing? And your next reaction is likely to be dismissive. Who cares about Latin, anyway? Just another dead language. Right?

Just as the language of childhood is dead to most adults. They are beyond it. They bury the discomforts and embarrassments. They have things in there place now. Don’t they?

Some parents take notice. They listen to their children and remember.

After this, therefore because of this. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. It is one of the most essential fallacies of a human life. Why do we assume such things? Because we were once children. It is the way we learned the order of things.

But if we were lucky and had parents or teachers who listened, we might have been opened to a world that made better sense and our childhood might have in fact been as simple as we wish is was.

This, by the way, is the best role for grandparents. They have suffered though childhood and youth and maturity. They have begun to notice, that just because some thing comes after another, the cause is not obvious. It’s not rocket science. It’s more like using our fingers to do brain surgery.

Were the psychological ‘issues’ of our lives caused by difficulties when we were young? Not exactly. More often they are made by ascribing the wrong cause to an effect, right from the start. Adults do it too. Especially adults with ‘issues.’

Religions, deeply catalogued in human experience, are often ready with explanations to difficulties we face. This is comforting. Importantly it separates the individual from a false assumption of a certain Latin phrase previously mentioned.

Religion may give a unique explanation or, as in the case of simpler things such as not eating swine or fish without scales, it might offer rules of conduct which avoid the need to work through cause and effect. The blessing of religion is the short cut. Do this. Don’t ask questions.

It appears politics has become the modern substitute religion as we have learned that we can indeed eat pork and catfish without dire consequence. But this too will not suit an enlightened mind or a truly modern sensibility, even if the conclusion is correct. We want to know why. At least, some of us want to know.

I don’t begrudge religious people their comforts. The short cuts often give them a much happier life–time free for other things. I am happy for them. I only hope they afford me the same courtesy. I am frankly happier in my misery. I get most of my pleasures from life by asking questions and seeking answers. It gives me something to write about, you know.

This is the nature of the stories I write. Most of the effort is a search for a cause to understand the effect. Sometimes–not commonly–a given problem is easily solved by an orderly arrangement of events–before and after. More commonly, flowers do not sting–bees do. A person is cold because the temperature is low and they failed to put on a coat even though their mother told them to a thousand times, not just because the temperature is low. A parent may have been neglectful, but the happiness of a child is not dependent solely on a parent.

So, I am re-writing my juvenile novel for the umpteenth time. Hopefully I’ll get it right this go. I know what happened. I just want to know why. The challenge of writing a juvenile story is to avoid assumption and look a little deeper. The adult knows more facts but is not necessarily smarter.

Stories for adults are far easier to write, after all. Children are less concerned by money and sex. And we all know that sex and money drive civilization. Don’t we?

Looking back over some of the designs, many of which took weeks to complete, I can trace my own intellectual and emotional history as well as my economic state of mind. The homes are smaller during periods of financial difficulty. They were largest when my bookshop business did best. But, more interestingly to me, they all have a central idea or purpose and looking at older plans now reminds me of dreams I’ve had and perhaps forgotten.

Most of my houses were designed for a rural setting. I have always wanted to live beyond the drone of cars, where the stars of the Milky Way pollute a deep black sky. I have always wanted to try my hand at gardening–carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, green beans. I like large fireplaces and the flutter and hiss of a fire. I am a connoisseur of well water. And I have always wanted one room built of stone where I could keep my books.

For perfection in that last regard, I cannot fully express my jealousy and admiration at first seeing the wonderful stone library built by John Adams at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. Of course, he earned and deserved that much.

It’s not a surprise then, perhaps, to learn that I have always lived in apartments. I’m told by people who assume greater wisdom that actually owning my own home would cure me of this foolishness. I, in turn, feel sorry for them for not properly appreciating their blessings. Forty-five years of apartment dwelling has given me a sense of certainty about my needs that is unswayed by issues with plumbing, painting, gutters, roofs, and all the rest. And besides, I have dealt with all of that during the years of operating my shop.

A key part of any of my designs has always been a desire to build the house with my own hands. This aspect of my dream has shrunk in recent years along with my economic and muscular wherewithal. And this brings me to a recent re-evaluation of Mr. Thoreau’s small project at Walden.

I cannot in any way be considered an ascetic and thus Thoreau’s cabin in the woods would not actually suit me. It is too small. I have slept in closets as large. I am not comforted by the closeness of the walls. There is a wood stove and not a fireplace. I like wood stoves, but I need a fireplace. The windows are too small. I like to look from my window when I write and when I pace. I pace a lot. The toilet there would mean an unbearable walk on a cold winter’s night.

Nevertheless, he built it. And he lived there. He sat at that small desk by that small window and wrote great words. The words did not mind. He lay at night in a bed that was little more than a bench and dreamed without restraint. And because his house was small, he got out a lot into the world about. I admit if I had my own dream home, I would have difficulty leaving it. Discomfort has its uses. But as I say, I am not an ascetic. I am not even a vegetarian.

But I am an architect of sorts. This is a fundamental profession of humanity. We don’t flourish in caves. Nests are inadequate for more than a season. Ants and beavers are good with mud, but their design lacks room for books.

It is my fault perhaps that I see the writing of a story in the same way I visualize a house. This is not a simple metaphor. The integrity of the finished structure is the object. What I want in writing is a finished product that serves a specific purpose and is a delight to look at. I need a fireplace for heat as well as beauty. I need a porch for the fires of summer and the colors of spring and fall. I need a library for background and study. I need a kitchen for food as well as the preparation of food. I need a bedroom for rest and pleasure. And I need a living room where the interaction of my family of characters is not only possible, but probable.

I understand that most novels are not written in this way now. It is the way Trollope wrote, and Victor Hugo, and Jane Austin. Merry-go-rounds and racetracks are better metaphorical examples for more modern works. And I see this as a fault in the modern world and not in my plans.

I used to plan great novels–epics and multigenerational affairs–great rambling country houses and post-Victorian extravaganzas. I could write for endless hours then. I enjoy reading mythology and enthusiastically mixed up a stew of gods and goblins and mortal dreamers. In fact, there is a science fiction story I have worked on for many years, and am determined yet to finish. It stands now at about a quarter-million words and I’m not half done.

But now, most of my projects are smaller. I write for about three hours each day. I don’t want the project to extend into years because I simply have fewer of those left in the pipeline and I have quite a long list of stories I want to tell. And so Thoreau’s little house takes on a new interest.

I design smaller houses now. Just a few rooms. A reduced kitchen for sustenance and coffee. A library for about three thousand favorite books. An indoor toilet with a shower is in order. I must have my shower in the mornings. Our children are on their own these days so one bedroom is sufficient, and a bedroom of less than Homeric dimensions is adequate. A living room that might assume a portion of several other parts will save space–but with at least one big window and a fireplace for the winters. And I’ll need a porch for the warmer weather and rainy days. There is little better time spent than standing on a dry porch during a summer rain.

I made several false starts before realizing a problem. The simpler the theme, the more difficult the story.

And certainly, writing a book to present such a theme is inherently ironic. But then irony is a part of the human comedy–as it is in the catching of whales, Ahab might have said at the last. More to the point, the game is afoot. The murder is happening now.

I have already mentioned here, in ‘The Hound and its consequences,’ why I chose the mystery genre. However, there is one thing I did not say before on that subject, because I thought it was too provocative to put forward without explanation: I do believe the book is actually being murdered. It’s a subject I will return to at a later moment.

My original hero was a bookseller. Well, of course! Casting myself in the John Wayne role was only natural. Wasn’t it? Maybe not. Besides, John Dunning and more than a few others had already planted in that field.

I turned then to a natural second choice: an author. But books about struggling authors are a bit common. There is too much real angst there to permit an unbiased view of the larger struggle. So I tried making him the great success–the author who had already achieved fame and fortune and was now faced with the consequence of his ambition. This is something I could imagine very easily, but actually knew nothing about. I am one of those angst-ridden strugglers, after all. It didn’t feel right.

What was I to do?

I tried a few variations. I had cast an author’s agent as a villain in my first go at it. Though she lacked the handlebar mustache, she otherwise fit the caricature quite well. Trouble was, the more I tried to make her human, the more I liked her.

So I asked myself, “Self…What would Nevil Shute do?”

This is a wise maneuver for any author but especially for me. Shute, the simple master, is my real hero. My writing is nothing like his in style, I know, but very much in his shadow (in my own mind at least)…And he’d find that very funny. His modesty was overwhelming. I don’t believe he ever had the pretensions of being a stylist or litterateur or casting a shadow except in the shape of his small plane on a landscape far below. He was a great storyteller who went about his task with the joy of an engineer and with the efficacy of a pilot–both of which he was.

You might say, shouldn’t that be the efficacy of an engineer and the joy of a pilot. And I would say yes, that too. But I know the joy Shute took in crafting his stories and cannot escape the knowledge that to Nevil Shute Norway, engineering was a calling. As an author, he crafted his stories like fine little machines–taking neither ‘little’ nor ‘machine’ in any pejorative sense. For a near perfect example, you must read Trustee from the Toolroom.

So I asked my question.

The answer was given in due time, as it always is in a Shute novel. There is no rushing it.

What I wanted was someone who made their living at the fringes of the book world and might examine all its aspects with a degree of independence–like a pilot above the landscape. I did not want to lay blame as much as discover it. I did not want be unfair with such a great wrong and place the onus on anyone other than the guilty. I wanted the kind of forensics which are not found in a one-hour television show.

My wish is that the Hound will entertain sufficiently for me to tell the whole story of Henry Sullivan and his discoveries, but I came to understand that I could not faithfully tell the tale in one short novel in any case. More than that, I was not about to sacrifice the telling of his adventures on an alter of speed, a key weapon in this heinous deed.

There are plenty of suspects in that mob which is destroying the book. I think it is worthwhile to consider them all in their own place.

And if the pace of Henry Sullivan in his sleuthing does not suit the audience, it will be on my own head, not on Nevil Shute. He is my mentor, but not my accomplice. I am on my own in this.

My grandfather would have been a good writer if he had been born to the opportunity. He told stories as easily as cutting a plug of tobacco and they usually lasted about as long. The final spit toward the nearest gully was the end of it. He often told stories we had heard before, but we listened and laughed to ourselves at the changes along the way.

My grandmother was a quiet and greathearted woman whose feelings were shared easily in a few words and made clear by the way she moved. Her story was in her very being. When knobby arthritic fingers turned gently over a small guinea hen egg just gathered from a hidden nest you knew quickly that it was warm and freshly laid.

My father’s parents wrote letters–high Catholic letters intended to instruct and bless and ask for blessing. There was a great deal of small personal detail to be found in them if you were patient and smart to the mannerisms and conventions. I was not, and quickly put them aside as a boy. More recently I discovered a few copies of my great grandfather’s letters to his son. There is no complaint for the hardships of life and much thanks for the gifts there. “I am slowly gaining strength. Was out to visit Ma’s grave & cut some grass this forenoon” was enough to say he had been sick. There I found his love-hate for politics, and newspapers, and the country that was his, not by birth, but by the gift of his own father’s escape from famine with a young family of my blood and name.

In high school I was blessed by a man who was a failed writer himself, and a failed artist, but not a failed teacher. I talked my way into his class because I needed the extra credit just to graduate. It was an advanced class and my grades were not good enough for entry so I gave him a piece of my first novel–a bad piece of work, but I suppose he thought anyone willing to write that much needed some kind of help. He taught us how to write like Hemingway, and Wolfe, and Fitzgerald. The mimicry was a lesson. Imitation was easy.

It was my own fault that I did not learn the simple and truer meaning of his lesson then, and had to prove it out the hard way afterward.

I don’t read aloud in public very well. I am too self-conscious. The sound of my voice always bothered me. And I was never a self-contained sort of fellow in any case, and react to other people too easily. Perhaps that is why I enjoy the solitude of writing.

It is common to hear writers speak of ‘voice.’ I didn’t start hearing mine until I overcame my reluctance to read to myself. In fact, reading aloud to myself changed everything. I re-discovered Thoreau that way. And Melville. And Conrad. And Shakespeare.

The spoken voice is not the matter. It may be whispered. The matter is to listen to your voice and find the truth in it. If you can shame yourself, you can shame others.

And your voice is not mine, any more than mine is Melville’s or my great grandfather’s. Finding one’s voice is just finding a way to listen.

Poor Vachel Lindsay tried to find his voice in public song, on an imagined stage transported from place to place by his own two feet–performance poetry of a different age. The drum of cadence overcame the reason in his words, and pitch obscured the emotion. When the novelty of it waned, he was betrayed by his own device, and poisoned on the world that ignored him.

Device is not voice, nor style.

Listen! Say the words again. It is why Shakespeare can be spoken now and understood while Byron is mostly lost. If you need a second education just to hear, then you might expect a smaller audience. At the end, the high culture of Byron meant nothing to his Greek compatriots. His love of freedom meant everything. I would have loved to hear him speak to them directly.

Thoreau spoke to Emerson. It was a high standard. But he spoke in his own voice, oddly thought, with unexpected emphasis. On Cape Cod, he tells us of meeting a young boy along the way, to no other purpose than the mere fact of it, and then later he speaks of the hardened women of that place–perhaps because he knew he was not hard enough for them. And that Cape Cod is gone to us now excepting those words. But you can know it still!

At Walden, Thoreau passes judgment on his poor Irish neighbor before stealing the remains of the man’s house. What once infuriated me now captures the ephemeral existence of two types, both of my own blood. Could I be so honest in print? Could I be so honest aloud to myself?

A voice is not perfectly voweled or always edged by consonants. A voice must betray the writer as much as it portrays the subject. There can be doubt in a meaning just as there is doubt in the mind, but this is not an excuse for badly singing a bad song. And a voice shaped neatly by the numbers of expectation will be quickly forgotten.

It was popular once to write like Hemingway. I understand the charm. But I never trained in a city newsroom or hid in a too shallow ditch to avoid a bullet. Now the urgency of digital film moves action along at a pace that Hemingway, or Melville, or Conrad would have found obnoxious. Reality is redefined by mimicry, conveniently digested by the numbers–digits are so much faster. So move along. Move along. You’ve seen all of this before. Move along. Play it again Sam. We will always have Paris. Or at least Ferris Bueller.

My own voice is from a different place. They don’t wear watches there. I write to the sound of the words. I walk as much there as I can. Until my mind hurts as much as my feet. I speak slowly. I report what I see. And if I cannot write with Hemingway’s simplicity, perhaps it is because I don’t see things as clearly–or perhaps they are not so simple to me.

That stage is in my head. I have not taken the roads that Vachel Lindsay walked and I have not heard the bird song that he knew. The actors come to my stage without practice. They have not rehearsed. They have been tossed there with a script they have not studied, but they were chosen because I knew them from other roles and believe they can handle the material. If the furniture is in the way, I move it. If the lighting is not sufficient, another is tilted in their direction. The script is penciled in my brain.

I give the actors the lines that I know. They take them–sometimes unhappily. If they object, I stop and pencil another. At the end, they stare at empty seats and imagine them filled. If the response is not what was wanted, the actors turn to me for redress. If I have something more for them, they begin again. If not, they abandon me to my own failure.

Did I choose the wrong scene? I read it through again aloud. It sounds right to me. What have I missed? I start again. Like my mother’s father, the story is never the same the next time it’s told. More time is spent here. Less there. It does not occur to me that the story is not worth telling any more than it did to him. It’s the story I know. The problem can only be in the way I tell it. It’s the performance, not the play.

That’s the arrogance of the writer. The hubris. The story is all that we have–so we think the story is worth telling. And it must be told in our own voice to be ours, not by convention or expectation. If it is miss-told, that is our own failure too. Not the reader’s. We cannot damn the empty seats.

I have put aside my hopes of re-establishing a bricks and mortar bookshop for the present. Not from a lack of interest or desire. More from the chastening of financial realities and the physical strain such an effort would call for. Still, I dream of my bookshop at night–sometimes in the day as well. I am a bookman at heart and soul. Most of what little I have learned that is not commonplace is about books and bookselling.

The thought arises with the question, “would I ever do it again?’–what would be my perfect bookshop now? Not a fantasy shop of all my best wishes and intentions, but an actual shop that might stay afloat on a sea of troubles. It’s more than a single essay could encompass, but I would enjoy the process of defining the possibility out of the vagaries of my still persistent dreams.

When I started the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in 1975, I had been selling books from a pushcart on the street for several years and doing a lot of dreaming–unrestrained by realities I had yet to encounter. For instance: if you choose a spot because the rents are low, it is likely the foot traffic will be correspondingly small. You must have insurance, and insurance must be paid every month or quarter–period (there is no friendly person at the other end of the phone line who will give you a dispensation just because they like books). Employees have their own worries and troubles and don’t respond well to delayed paychecks.

Almost as overwhelming is the body of literature about bookselling which advises very specific approaches to the business based on hundreds of years of hard won experience and the mundane facts of publisher’s discounts, profit margins, and promotional costs, without ever mentioning the physical needs of food and sleep, much less sex. Sex is, after all, a big part of bookselling. Didn’t you know?

And politics. In our age, politics seems to trump almost all the senses–especially common sense.

My own history is a case in point. I am a libertarian. Libertarians are an ancient political sect with an absolute antipathy to slavery and an equally stringent belief in the golden rule. In other words: don’t tell me what to do, and I’ll treat you with the same respect with which you treat me. Along with my love of fiction, poetry and history, I sought to be a resource for libertarian literature when I started my shop. About twenty percent of my very limited funds for book-buying were guided by this political want. It was disastrous.

There are not enough people who even know what the word ‘libertarian’ means much less the interest necessary to carry such an expense. Given the unusually large student audience in Boston, and the prevailing academic political ideology of our times, had I chosen instead to be a conduit for socialist literature I might have found some success. But politics often trumps clear thinking.

I still believe that any business must be guided by a prevailing philosophy, but I should have restrained my desire to proselytize beyond my love of literature. It was bad enough that I was insisting on carrying a substantial weight of poetry–a section everyone wants to see in a shop but few make use of. Even fewer people read the likes of Karl Popper or Friedrich Hayek, than poetry. When the Random House rep came in he used to shake his head at me, not merely as a fool, but for the terrible waste of effort.

What saved us the first few years was science fiction. We sold more of that than any other. Science fiction and mystery amounted to about half our total income. Another quarter of our expenses were covered by the classics. The paperback revolution of the fifties and sixties was just ending, and almost any great work was still available brand new for just a few dollars.

The other salvation was something done out of necessity and in total ignorance. I was then as I am now a habitual buyer of used books. To fill out the sparse shelves as my budget for new titles ran out I brought in most of my own collection. These were my favorites–Nevil Shute, Raphael Sabatini, Robert Louis Stevenson, C.S. Forester, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Mark Twain, Harlan Ellison, George Orwell, Flannery O’Conner, Raymond Chandler, Elmer Kelton, Frederick Brown, Frederick Manfred, Arthur Conan Doyle, and a few hundred others. And we sold them quickly. My collection of old Blue Book magazines disappeared in a few weeks. My Argosys were gone in days.

I found my way by doing what worked and was comfortable. We sold back issues of Playboy magazines until my older daughter began to wander the aisles. I had a sudden epiphany. We sold comic books until about the same time. Whatever your own perfect bookshop might be, it must meet the measure of your own life. You can’t be doing something you wouldn’t want other’s to do. And you can not be selling something you would not be proud to show your children.

So, given what I have learned, what would I do? Quidnunc?

Firstly, I would have to ignore or control my fear of technology. If the internet has actually made the physical book into a door-stop, all my conjecture is moot. I must befriend the reality far enough to make it useful without being used by it.

Secondly I would have to ignore or control my worry about politics. If the public wants to control my business and tell me what I can sell, all my conjecture is again, moot.

Thirdly, I must set a budget. How much might I have to spend? More importantly, what would I want to spend? Whatever else I conjure, I’ll have to cover the cost of it for at least a year or two. It generally takes a business about three years to establish itself. Income from the first two years might pay for a third. A little debt financing might be helpful. (A kind and equally foolish relative perhaps?)

Let’s figure out what I might need.

Books. Shelves. Space. Time enough.

Being omnivorous, I would like to have books in most categories. My priorities would be fiction, history, biography, poetry, drama, and the arts. I suppose I am rather fond of essays as well. And I must have enough of them at a price to sell and make a profit.

Shelving is best made of solid wood. Forget metal or the composites (more on that later). When you have figured what your budget might be for books, you will be able to calculate how much shelving you’ll need.

The space must be adequate for the shelving itself and the room between the shelves for two average human beings to pass without incident or the necessity of intimate relations. My proposition that sex was a part of the perfect bookshop was not made with consideration for narrow aisles. And the cost of this space is relative to the location, the location, and the location–with an allowance for utilities.

The time you will need is dependent on the time you think you have, multiplied by a factor of at least two. Whatever time you cannot cover yourself will have to be covered by others. They will want to be paid reasonably for their effort.

When you have estimated the last three elements, you will undoubtedly go back and recalculate the first. After all, whether rent is ten dollars a square foot or 100 dollars a square foot, is going to alter your conception of the books you carry. If you want to run the store on weekends only, you can’t cover the cost of prime real estate during the rest of the week.

Remember, the proposition here is for a ‘perfect bookshop.’ Not a money mill (as if any bookshop could be that.) This is an ideal as envisioned by a bibliophile. A book lover. Remember. There is sex involved.

(to be continued)

If I am misunderstanding the thesis, it may be because it borders on many similar ideas rampant in the area of literary criticism. I cannot read music, and have only a small knowledge of musical history. What I understand quite well is what I enjoy hearing. And beyond that, there is a clear and primordial relationship of music to everyday human life that is not difficult to comprehend.

Communication between human beings is an essential element of survival. An accurate scream across the tall grass of an ancient savanna was the difference between life and death. Communicating the hard won skills of hunting, gathering, cooking, and preserving required language. Passing the wisdom of experience on to the next generation was crucial. Music is certainly part of all that.

Back in the eighties, Ted Nugent became obsessed with the evil he saw inherent in Muzak. Nugent’s quixotic quest seemed wrong-headed to me even then, though admirable of purpose. Wasn’t this medium being debased and prostituted by the aural abuse of musical devices? Were not humans being manipulated and controlled by beat and rhythm, melody and harmony, dissonance and consonance?
I wrote an essay then pointing out that music was a language and that this was a matter of freedom of speech.

This is still my position.

I detest hip-hop and think that John Cage’s conception of music is a joke. Silence is never so golden as when the pretensions of academics are removed from the equation. But, I would not consider the idea that some greater power should silence stupidity, nor music, lest I myself be caught in the fold.

Certainly noise can be obnoxious. A social understanding of noise is in order. Garbage trucks at 3 am are beyond defending. My neighbors playing hip-hop at 3 am must be controlled, if only by the decibel.

And that is just it. It’s a social matter. The more homogeneous the culture, the less dissonance is created by the exercise of ‘normal’ behavior. The great challenge of modern American culture is that we do not live in Icelandic isolation. My neighbor may be from Mexico, Brazil, India or even Canada. One must be forgiving of cultural difference if society is going to function. I may need the fellow to administer the ether when I am on the operating table, teach my children, fix my car, or cook my meal at the restaurant. I don’t want him as my enemy. He may not care for the books I sell or the words I write, but if he is my friend, he may keep his radio turned down a notch after midnight. And I won’t impose my Sibelius on him.

I don’t use racial epithets or tell racial jokes, not because they are against the law, but because they may offend my neighbor. It’s a good reason. I benefit by his talents. It’s part of contributing to a society that benefits me. But if my neighbor wants to tell me what I can write, or the books I can sell, I have a complaint.

Whether or not my neighbor has intellectually understood the delicate balance between liberty and responsibility, I have to defend my right to say what I think. If I don’t, I’ll lose it. If a politician can tell me what music I can play, I have already lost it.

All of this is related. A particular piece of film music may be created for that medium out of various needs. The immediate association may only be a small part of its creation. Certainly it might have its origins in the classical traditions, or in the street music of Sao Paulo. Certainly film music must use devices invented well before, otherwise it would not speak to the listener. I cannot write in a private language and expect readers. Random sound would be noise (despite Cage’s foolishness). Already, film music must have its roots outside of its immediate use or else the reference is lost.

Then there is the intellectual project of the film itself. This might be fairly simple. Say, an action suspense thriller. Now the music is associated in the mind to the response of the audience to that depiction. And then there is the aftermath. The film may be left behind, because the music holds an urgency that quickly conjures certain moods on its own. I was never a soldier but taps and reveille have a meaning to me. And still, it is not unjustified for a film director to chose a specific score knowing that the audience response to that music will remind them of his film long after.

We do not live in a classical age, but classical music conjures an appreciation of my world that I cannot do without. Mozart wore a powdered wig and I wear an Irish cap, but his music gives me a pleasure he could have predicted. And in fact, his letters show that he did just that.

Musak may in fact be manipulative, but if it is obnoxious to most people rather than comforting–if standing patiently within the small space of a closed elevator is not unnerving enough–then it’s added cost will not be born. Perhaps Ted Nugent would prefer a prayer, or a political diatribe to take the occupant’s mind off of the claustrophobic reality of the moment.

The great hobgoblins of the Twentieth Century–Stalin and Hitler–both used music to control the ‘masses.’ Some of that music is still played. I don’t think the listener is envisioning gulags when they play Shostakovich. But a few notes from the film Jaws brings an immediate response. Is that wrong? Perhaps to some, but I think they miss the point. The few notes from Jaws is now as ominous as “It was a dark and stormy night.” The language in both cases has grown by the addition. And still, “White Christmas” will survive the abuse of elevator speakers because, after all, it’s a damn good song.

The absurdity of all of these ideas relegated them quickly to oblivion. But nevertheless, they will be proposed again, and again. It is a smallness of mind which is tightly bound to an egocentric view of the universe. It is a verbalization of the thought that if I cannot get such rewards, then no one should have them.

Yet I see that there are proposals in the newspapers to limit the salaries of executives at ‘big’ corporations. I suppose the same proponents of this omnipotence would agree that the multi-billion dollar corporations behind Random House (Bertelsmann–Germany: 6 billions in 2006), or Viking (Pearson—UK: 7 billions in 2006), or Harper Collins (Harper-Collins—US: a mere 1.3 billion in 2006) should not be allowed to pay Jodi Picoult, Clive Cussler, James Patterson, Stephen King or any of those other fat cats the millions they get.

No! It’s different! Yes! I suppose so. The AIG executives who have been pilloried for their greed are responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue, and the employment of tens of thousands and the welfare of millions of people world-wide.

But, they lost a whole lot of money you say. You mean, of course, that Stephen King should be held responsible for the returns of other Viking authors that are later dumped for $6.95 on the discount tables at Barnes and Noble. Oh, yes, I forgot. Stephen jumped ship from Viking and is now with Scribner (Simon and Schuster/CBS—US: a paltry $800 million in 2006). Did he do that just for the money? I wonder?

The issue here is not only that there are no two authors who are created equal nor any two executives, but that any attempt by a government to reduce such inequities of life will result in a government that very few of us would want to rule our lives.

The true danger here—no, not just a danger, but the damage—is that human beings are being tagged as something other than what they are, and dealt with as mere names (businessman, traitor, heretic).

I have known many thousands of business people in my life. I am one myself, albeit a truly bad one. I have never met a successful business person who was careless or stupid. Wrongheaded at times, yes. As any human being might be. But more often the successful entrepreneurs I have known have been the most concerned about values beyond money. And, not ironically, those people I have known who are the most often concerned about money and who too often value money above principle, have been like myself, poor.

For quick and insightful reference on these matters I recommend two short articles. One by Holman W. Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal of March 24th, 2009 and the other by Jake DeSantis in the New York Times of March 25th, 2009.

I fear that with politicians bent on power driving a popular sentiment of greed and avarice fed by media who do not care about right as much as they do ratings, the damage of these days will live with us for many years to come.

What was loved about Bronson Alcott is difficult for me to see now. I have engaged the question several times in my life, beginning when I was nineteen or so and attending an experimental college in Vermont. Alcott was an experimenter with ideas, and much interested in educational reform, and thus an easy target for someone looking for an answer to the wholesale human stupidity that seemed to overwhelm the world about me at a time when my generation were being used as cannon fodder in Vietnam and nuclear annihilation was the only monitor of peace.

Who was this man who was so loved by Emerson, Thoreau, Parker, Fuller, and Channing—and at least respected by Hawthorne and the difficult Mr. Garrison?

A new biography has appeared by John Matteson: Eden’s Outcasts. Even better I thought, this was something of a dual biography of both Bronson and his daughter Louisa. Her bravery has always been a beacon to me. I got my hopes up. A life long quandary might finally be answered.

I had previously read some part of a turgid biography by B.F. Sanborn, Shepard Odell’s Pedlar’s Progress: the life of Bronson Alcott, Madelon Bedell’s The Alcott’s: Biography of a Family, Van Wyck Brooks’ Flowering of New England, and a book about Bronson Alcott, the teacher, which may be the same one by Dorothy McCuskey noted in Matteson’s bibliography.

As pleasant and well written as this book of Matteson’s is, however, I found no answers. And the failure seemed particularly severe on the day I finished Eden’s Outcasts, as it was the day that the United States Congress voted to indenture my children for the amount of a million million dollars, for all their lives–for the foreseeable future. Bronson Alcott was not fond of slavery in any form—even to the servitude of the cow for its milk, and was every bit as independent of spirit as his friend Henry David Thoreau. This I thought.

It was Alcott’s pursuit of freedom that first enchanted me, I suppose. But I cannot remember, and I have long ago lost my notes. At the experimental Mark Hopkins College in Brattleboro, Vermont I was free to pursue any intellectual question which caught my fancy. And I did. With much the same result as Alcott’s repeated failures and changes of direction. And much like Alcott, I learned very little from my mistakes because the framework of my efforts was never steady. One cannot establish a true direction without fixed points of reference.

But then I was young. I had all the time in the world—or at least until I was drafted.

What later kept my attention was the respect paid to Alcott by others. What was it that kept their admiration despite all his failures. How could his family love a man who so often endangered their health and welfare?

This particular point is made poignant by one episode in particular at Fruitlands, detailed again in the Matteson book. Fruitlands was the short lived utopian experiment established by Alcott and Charles Lane near Harvard Massachusetts in 1843. There, with the meager crop finally ready to be harvested, and winter approaching, Bronson and Lane go off for weeks in search of new recruits to their ideals, and much of the summer’s work is lost. His wife and daughters run to the fields before a storm to gather in what they can of the ripened grain. Most of the members of the small band, including his young daughters, are already weakened by foolish experiments with diet at a time when there was almost no knowledge of nutrition beyond the tried and true formulas passed down by the generations. The traditional formulas had, of course, been abandoned in favor of new ideals as well. The girls and their mother can save only a few weeks worth of harvest from the storm.

The lives of his loved ones were at stake. He had failed and altered his own ideas again and again and not learned humility enough to question his own actions before they endangered his family. What egomaniacal hubris of intellect would allow a supposedly intelligent and caring man to ignore the most blatant facts of life? Yet he went off and left his family to survive as best they could without him.

Was Bronson Alcott a monster? Are the three hundred odd congressmen who are so willfully toying with my children’s future monsters? I am sure that everyone of them has a family of their own and a rationalization for their behavior. Yet you may read the letters of Emerson, and those of Alcott’s own daughter Louisa and never get a glimmer of the madness that possessed Bronson the philosopher, the teacher, the father, the husband. You would think from reading today’s newspapers that we have never tried these insane measures before. But I am old enough to remember the 1970’s very well.

What I am thinking now is that my own hope of finding reason in the life and work of Bronson Alcott was foolish from the start. He was not an abolitionist because he believed in the freeborn liberty of each human being. He was an abolitionist because he himself could not assume any responsibility for others and thus wished to deny the right to anyone else. And Congress may hock the future of my children without restraint because they have no understanding of the responsibility of debt or the cruel cost of indebtedness. I know this keenly. They are made rich by their political whims. And to those they enslave with inflation and taxes, they can offer any relief they wish to imagine without cost to themselves—better yet, they gain votes by every promise, no matter how impossible.

Bronson Alcott was loved for his dreams and ideals by people seemingly unable to question the actual results, failure after failure. His wife supported him, cooked his meals, washed his cloths, bore his children, nursed them and him, and enabled this man to day dream his life away on wishes and hopes untethered by reality. He was insane. Just as our present Congress is insane. And every citizen of our nation who voted for these political purveyors of wishes and wants is insane—just as the black slaves who put on the uniform of the Confederacy to fight for their masters were insane—made insane by fears for their welfare and unable to understand the cost of freedom, or the responsibility.

There is no reason for Bronson Alcott’s actions. He did what he wished. There is no rational explanation for what is being done in Congress. They can do it, so they will. It is simply an observed fact.

I take a breath, and consider this, but I still do not understand Bronson Alcott.

The world has changed. Whale oil lamps and buggy whips are sold on eBay. The internet has become a billboard for advertisement. Finding an audience for a book before it is published might be done in a new way.

It is worth noting here that the Hound is the result of unintended consequences. I wanted a story about a bookseller that might offer a glimpse of a world I was familiar with, and in terms that might be interesting to others. I wanted to capture certain aspects of this business before they were lost to memory or had simply lost any relevance at all.

I have been aware for most of my life that the profession of bookselling was doomed. The world of business which was made out of the writing, publishing, and selling of books—a world born in the Sixteenth century, nursed in the Seventeenth, raised in the Eighteenth, which then flourished in the Nineteenth and Twentieth–was about to end. I was born too late to romp and wallow in the lush pages of printed literature with complete abandon.

And I did not intend at first to write a mystery. That came from wanting to reveal secrets in ways that might keep the interest of a reader—to entertain someone who might otherwise be doing their laundry or making love or more likely, something in-between.

With the mystery story, Edgar Allen Poe invented an infernal device for written entertainment that is hard to better. Matters of life and death are universal and offer more than just a flavoring to any story. Once introduced, they are difficult or impossible to ignore.

As we work through our days with the petty ordering and completion of the matters of consequence which occupy our lives, the repetition and detail tend to obscure larger and deeper meaning, like the forest lost in the trees. Introducing a matter of life and death puts an edge on things. It sets the time available. It eliminates the trivial. It focuses the mind, as one great wit has said.

Just like everyone else’s, a bookseller’s life is filled by the mundane detail. I was not about to entertain anyone with hair raising accounts of wily purchases, cunning research, and breathtaking sales. I have had all three but not in the same moment. Mr. Poe’s device was a perfect solution for someone like myself, who sees the waning importance of the book as a matter of the greatest concern.

I have been selling books for all of my adult life. The only thing I have been doing for longer than that is writing. When I attempted my first novel I cannot remember, but I completed one when I was fifteen. This effort was born upon a wave of great hubris brought on by the success of a story I wrote for Mrs. Menelli in my ninth grade English class. If she is still with us, I hope she has some idea of the trouble she caused.

I wrote half a dozen novels after that, and then quit in the great frustration of too many rejections and too little time that engulfs most lives. We do what we need to do. The details of my own experience in this regard are not so different from many others I know of.

When the profession of bookselling, which had supported me and my family for so many years, finally failed to meet the demands of my responsibilities, I took a look back at what I had done. It was not all for the worst, no matter the final result. My own mistakes were only part of a larger fabric. And I was happy with too much of my experience to simply throw it over as a total loss.

Well before the end, I knew what was coming and watched its approach like a farmer at the borderland observes the gathering of an enemy horde. Blame for the catastrophe might be placed on poor businessmen like myself, the mass marketing of publishers, the predatory techniques of the chain store, the short term values of authors, the misplaced priorities of the town librarian, the coming of the internet, or on the failure of a school system no longer competent to teach the importance of literature. There are many possible villains in this story.

I wanted to write about this and set about doing it in the best way I knew how. I borrowed Mr. Poe’s device and against that template I place a few of my own experiences which seemed to complement each other. In fact, I have physically observed the essential part of everything in this novel, or else it has actually happened to me. I have never been personally involved in a murder investigation, but I have witnessed the aftermath of death countless times.

It was in the realization that I had been a small part of so many larger stories, and with the thought that they might serve as the parts of some greater understanding of the death of the book, that I began to gain a measure of control over the story I wanted to tell.

For the protagonist, I chose a character younger than myself but not actually young because I know that when I began I was far too stupid to even observe many of the things I wanted now to describe. I decided to make him a book-hound rather than a book seller to avoid the obvious problem of having him stuck behind a sales counter for a large portion of every day. (That peculiar anti-adventure is still beyond my powers to describe with verve to anyone who has not survived it.)

After finishing the first draft of a novel, I realized that I had conjured a rather detailed back story to the characters, and given them a future that mattered to me. And still, I had not come close to touching on all the issues which seemed of importance. Almost immediately I began writing about what had happened to these people shortly before my first imaginings. The Hound is this earlier story.

If this story meets with some reasonable interest, the second novel may hopefully be published next year. In matter of fact, if my audience for Hound proves too small to support the costs of commercial publishing, I will present the second book in the series on this web site as I am now doing with Habits of the Heart. I would not want to frustrate even a few sympathetic readers.

Habits of the Heart, by contrast, is not a mystery at all, but a fictionalized memoir of my own foolishness which seems to have entertained me more to write than it has the editorial powers who have so far taken the time to read it.

Still, Habits of the Heart is the way I write. If it entertains you, perhaps you will want to buy a copy of the Hound when it appears this fall.

In my youth, an article appeared called The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin. At the time, it was the second most thought provoking thing I had ever read. It prompted one unfinished novel in response at a time when I was overextended with other ambitions and has recently been the seed of a new effort I am well into the midst of and hope to finish in a year or two.

The point of view with which I took issue long ago was that society was greatly diminished by the loss to abuse and political expediency of the physical ‘commons.’ Or even that this magical place used to be at the center of a more pastoral and humane village life.

Imagine, if you will, a Mr. Om and his family, sitting beside the fire in a cave on a bitter winter evening. Suddenly the caribou skin bursts open and the Du police enter declaring that Om is under arrest for having violated the patent rights of Og, the recognized inventor of fire, as they throw a bucket of water on the flames.

Consider, please, that the chemical properties of aspirin were known to many ‘primitive’ peoples throughout history, but a German company developed a manufacturing technique and patented the palliative potion, reserving exclusive rights to it as property until an inconvenient war offered an opportunity to the politicians in this country to declare those rights to be void.

A great but profligate author dies. His house and silverware are taken to pay off a small portion of his debts. But the copyrights to his work are passed on to his children who live happily ever after on the proceeds–while the unpaid fishmonger and baker in town go bankrupt and their own children never see the inside of a college door.

Why would an American company spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours of human life on developing a new computer chip if they knew in advance that as soon as it was presented to the public, a Chinese company would take the design and replicate it for pennies.

Ask yourself, “Self, if I were dying of cancer and knew that the cure was sitting on a shelf in a lab but not available because legal costs were too great, would I resign myself to death or find a crowbar.”

For my own part, I would object to any law that forced me to pay for the use of the words I write. But words were indeed invented and every small combination of words I could ever conjure has likely been used before. I have learned to read from the works of others, and all of my own use of words has been shaped and guided by their genius. What do I owe those masters for their gift?

The crisis which currently shadows our society is an appropriate and useful definition of intellectual property. I would offer the further judgment that it might be the most important crisis we face, but I don’t expect a mob to form over the issue either to the left or the right. The greater portion of humanity will go about there lives, reading what they will, burning books in their fires, and giving themselves headaches with or without the permission of Bayer pharmaceuticals.

In the same year that the World Trade Center was destroyed by people who hate the Western concept of individual rights, Stephen Kinsella fired another broadside into this battle with his article Against Intellectual Property, delving into the fundamental theories behind our concepts concerning the ownership of ideas.

And now authors Michele Boldrin and David Levine have written the book, Against Intellectual Monopoly. I have not yet read this, but intend to as soon as possible. An excellent article by Jeffery A. Tucker, A Book That Changes Everything, about the practical issues discussed by Boldrin and Levine, has alerted me to what I have in store, and I can barely wait.

As I said, I am much in the middle of things, and cannot drop what I am doing just now, but I would welcome any thoughts on the issues involved, and I will offer my own critique in the near future. If you have time to comment here, I promise to steal only the good ideas for my own use. In the mean time, check out Mr. Tucker’s comments at mises.org.

A Book That Changes Everything by Jeffrey A. Tucker
Ludwig von Mises Institute

http://mises.org/story/3298

Against Intellectual Property, by N. Stephan Kinsella
JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES, Spring, 2001

http://www.stephankinsella.com/ip/

Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David Levine; Cambridge University Press.

http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm

The Tragedy of the Commons, by Garrett Hardin
Science, December 1968

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/162/3859/1243

A friend who shall remain Scottish sent me a link in response to the second installment of this series of rants about the business of writing, editing and publishing. As a consequence, I have completely re-written the original drafts of this post and the next. Such feedback and response was not possible in the world of ink and paper, and thus another dawning of light on Marblehead.

I was again humbled by the potential of the internet in making this very post. For a long while I have told a simple story as an example of a moment of realization which now appears to be a false memory, a conflation of several different journeys made over thirty years ago which I have unconsciously edited for a selective purpose and remembered as one.

Many years ago, soon after my arrival in Boston, I went up toward Cape Ann through Marblehead before dawn with a friend and stood at the concrete wall in Gloucester, Massachusetts, close by the Fishermen’s Memorial. ‘They that go down to the sea in ships,’ it says there below the blue-green brass figure of a man in wet-weather garb leaning on the wheel of his boat.

It was a dark and gloomy morning and it was February as well, with a steady bite of breeze and the water worked into a chop of black and gray, with discolored hulks of ice piled in bunkers along the narrow beach. There was no real color, only shades of darkness.

Boats were already out and some appeared to be returning, their lights cutting the black like low flying planes. Not being a very brave fellow myself, I could not think what it took to be a fisherman on such a morning. It appeared to us that our own venture was wasted. There would be no sun. No light on Marblehead that morning. I was for climbing back into the car for warmth.

My friend said “No. Wait.”

My friend had been a fisherman. His father owned a scallop boat out of New Bedford and he had worked there from an early age and he knew the look of the weather on the water. My friend had been to war, and now back, was torn between returning to his father’s boat and all the dangers and beauty there or finishing college. College meant another life entirely. His pilgrimage that morning had meanings I could not fathom.

We waited.

I turned my back to the press of wind from the sea and pulled my hat down tighter. That way, I faced the statue of the Fisherman. I danced in place for warmth.

Suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown, the fisherman’s face was illuminated a copper red. It was startling, because it appeared the light came from within the metal itself. And at that instant my friend spoke again.

“There. Look!”

I turned.

Just above the dark peninsula of land at the far side of the harbor there was now a scar in the sky which transmuted to silver, gold, and ruby red. Slowly then it parted to a pale blue beyond. The world divided before us out of the darkness. It caught my breath long enough even for me to hold my words.

When I turned back again, the entire statue had caught the light, but that first bright illumination of the fisherman’s face was gone.

There are moments of illumination. A popular trope is to call this an epiphany. I am not sure of that. ‘Epiphany’ ought to be reserved to describe a realization. We do not always learn from our moments of illumination. Most often, they pass and are forgotten. This must be because what we suddenly see does not relate clearly to what we already know. But even if we lack comprehension, we have glimpsed a new possibility. We can go that way to see more, or simply consider the enlargement of our dominions from the dark.

My problem now is that this did not happen quite that way. My vision while freezing my butt at the wall in Gloucester happened late one February afternoon, after a false sunset, when a winter storm moved in on our plans to eat lobster at Woodman’s in Essex. The dawn break over fishing boats took place one foggy Summer morning. And this correction of faulty memory took place because of the accessibility of internet. Now I am faced with a certain unhappiness. I liked the re-imagined memory better. That, I suppose, is the nature of spending so much time in the provinces of the mind.

I am currently working through emendations of the text to a novel, Hound, in the light of comments made by one of the publisher/editor/dishwashers who bravely took on the task of making this manuscript into a physical book. Quite naturally, demands are being made to reshape my imagined history in ways that conform to the commons of our language.

To write a story is to live in a separate place in one’s brain. It is that way with me, at least, and I have read the comments of other writers who say much the same thing. It is a form of walking schizophrenia. The attendant loss of grasp on reality is very real.

This place the writer has conjured is palpable to them. To move a chair in a room or alter the words of a character is as mad as walking naked on the street. But often it must be done. The turn of your imagined universe must be corrected to meet the needs of a reader who has no idea of your own madness. And then you must realign the planets in their orbits so that they do not spin away out of control. All of this process is ever more subtle than this hyperbole. But then, it is that way.

As I was saying, I received a link to an article from a Scottish friend, concerning editing. It is an interview with a successful practitioner of the black arts. And that editor confirmed so much of what I was intent on saying in this series of essays, I decided to use his comments to restructure my own thoughts.

(I’ll continue shortly.)

Following the article was an extensive field of footnotes and links. This was impressive in size, but not in content. Most of the links were to sources which were in fact drawn from other linked sources. In other words, if I wrote an article based on the sources cited, I too could become a source. This ingrown toenail of research is equivalent to using the same word to define itself.

And though I am not a scholar, only an interested party, I immediately noticed the absence of citations for original scholarly works which might contradict the thrust of the article. The Arthur legend was, by this account, a myth built on a lie–essentially that Arthur was merely a romantic legend.

One defender of the veracity of the legends, Geoffrey Ashe, is indeed there. Ashe is footnoted several times, mostly for his attempts to defend Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, a work produced more than half a millennium after the fact. But Norma L. Goodrich, who has done much greater and more interesting work in the area of original sources, is missing. I do take Goodrich’s part in the argument, but my concern is more than that.

I use Wikipedia every day. I find it to be an invaluable research tool for everything from confirmation of spelling to finding other sources I had not yet seen. But this dependence is a great handicap as well. Good scholarly research begins at home. Scholarly research is born in taking pleasure in knowing, in discovery—in grasping a mere fact and combining it with others through comprehension and imagination. Reading. If the young potential scholar is clicking their way to competence in a term paper, what does the future hold?

I have taken a great concern myself in the inherent nature of the internet as a medium which can be abused by the powers-that-be to achieve political purpose. I obviously have no problem with opinion or the free expression thereof. What I fear for is the acceptance of unvetted sources and the use of the medium to direct popular opinion.

And worse–as books become artifacts, and scholarly work is kept in the ether alone, what will be the deterrent to altering facts to suit the political disposition of the moment.

For another example, I have recently been reading the work of Amity Shlaes, the author of a wonderful book, The Forgotten Man, a new history of the Great Depression. I took a peek at the Wikipedia entry on her. It was at best an adolescent slap and at worst a Paul Krugman type abuse of fact to achieve a political put-down. I use the example of Krugman in this instance as a well known and established figure, Nobel Prize winner, and all around shite, who has spent the last twelve years of his life wallowing in his own political bile for reasons I don’t care to know. The emphasis in the Wikipedia article was clearly on certain associations and comments made by Shlaes, taken out of context, which the Wikipedia author disapproved of. And who was this critic–perhaps Krugman himself? We cannot know.

The anonymity of the source of Wikipedia articles is the problem. Anyone can be mistaken. Prejudice is natural. H. L. Mencken made a good case for that. But the hidden agenda of ‘Anonymous’ is a clear danger and warning.

It is, of course, this very anonymity that made Wikipedia grow. ‘Everyman’ might pretend to be a scholar. Like a giant ‘Facebook’ for the intellectually timid. A home for pseudo-intellectual stalkers.

Wikipedia is a great common ground of information and one of the very best developments of the internet age, but that age is only just begun, and Wikipedia is at present a sort of Central Park. By day a playground, refuge, and leafy avenue, but by night, a place where truth might be mugged and facts stolen.

As might have been said in Arthurian times, beware, ye who venture there.

Virgil wrote his poetry with a quill. Herodotus wrote his histories in the same manner. Neither had any concept of publishing, and yet we are still reading them.

In publishing, a five hundred year old business, every single element but one has been changed over the last fifty years. From the submission of the manuscript to the selling of the book in the bookshop, there is little that resembles my first forays into Anderson’s Bookshop in Larchmont, New York. In fact, most of the processes which are commonly used in publishing today were not even envisioned fifty years ago.

People will still be reading fifty years from now, but with the current mentality in charge, publishing will be an artifact. The problems facing the industry today will certainly kill this five hundred year old profession, and the effect will be as great as if we were returned to a world lit by fire—the world of Gutenberg.

It is as if the Three Stooges were in an airplane and wanting to land. What do they do? Naturally. They hit the pilot over the head.

It may surprise some to know that publishing has grown over the past fifty years—by several times over–more publishers, more people employed by publishing, more books, more readers, more sales. Yet, through most of that time, it seems that the industry has complained. The complaints were heard because they came from two very visible and vocal parts of the business.

One was the independent bookseller. The number and the size of bookshops grew—but most were chain stores using the economies of modern corporate law. My own bookshop was a casualty of the problems that have plagued the business during that time.

But I have been railing about the diminishment of both endangered parts all my adult life.

Despite phenomenal growth, there is one key element which has been shrinking—and as you might expect, it is the same element without which the entire industry will come to an end.

In the beginning, the patron was the ‘editor.’ They chose the work to be published because there was no ‘publishing industry’ that yet existed. The middle class world of merchants and buyers was only just being born. The patron—be it the church, or the prince—was in command of the heights. ‘Private property’ was hardly imagined. Property was what was held by force or dispensed for favors. Books were tools, used to impart instruction by the prince or the church—presenting only the information they wanted known.

Gutenberg changed all that. Not coincidentally, he was born into a new age of business. People had income beyond the favors dispensed by the lords. Gutenberg was a business man. A goldsmith. And he saw a profit to be made in the mass production of the book most potential buyers wanted. And Gutenberg was not only the first printer as we know it, but the first publisher, and the first editor, and the first bookseller.

As that business grew, and several new professions were born from those first efforts in Mainz, one job became the key to the success of all the others. The editor.

Now, to skip forward for just a moment. There are some who will argue that the profession of editor has necessarily changed as well. Much of that responsibility is now in the hands of the literary agent and the marketing department. Well, yes it has and is. But that is the problem. An agent cannot fill this function and be a good agent as well—it is a conflict of interest which favors the agent and not the author or the work. And as for the marketing department, one word: Detroit.

The most visible remains of the once proud profession of ‘editor’ can be seen in the person of a Michael Korda. And Korda, as reported recently in the New York Times, when asked about recent belt tightening in the publishing industry, thinks hard times will pass and soon everybody will be “back to doing what they were doing before.” Certainly the icon of the ‘power lunch’ who dispensed his favors from the Grill room at the Four Seasons might think that. He has benefited greatly by being part of the problem.

The ‘power lunch’ with Michael Korda has everything to do with a profligate establishment of politics over principle and nothing in common with the small brick building on the corner of Washington and School streets in Boston, where James Fields and George Ticknor once prompted the art of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to name but a few.

(to be continued)

Link: New York Times; Puttin’ Off The Ritz: New Austerity in Publishing by Motoko Rich. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/books/05publ.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=puttin’%20on%20the%20ritz&st=cse

Failed aspirations are at least frustrating, and often the hard futility of dreams turned to dust can produce a bitterness which colors your responses to other matters of life and death and spoils the small enjoyments which are cumulatively the better part of a life.

It occurs to me that it was dumb luck that I chose other outlets for my aspirations in addition to my writing. Bookselling has been a joy. And better than that, taking a part in the raising of three kids has been more important to my happiness than anything else I could have imagined on paper.

Still. I have wanted to be a writer since I was nine years old. That is for over fifty years. That’s a lot of aspiring. So why would I like to say I stopped what has come so easily and in fact given me far more enjoyment than frustration?

The matter is summed up quite well by an article in the Wall Street Journal for January 3rd, 2009. “Blockbuster or Bust.”

Now it is simple for the “summer soldier and sunshine patriot” among us to be critical of American foreign policy, or ask why the same politicians who created the financial debacle we all must endure are now in charge of correcting it, but when the crisis gets closer to home, we shy from our common sense. We can all be maroons when faced with choices which conflict with our misconceptions of short term self-interest.

When I was forced to close my bookshop a few years ago, I wrote a piece called “The Crepuscule” which caused a small buzz at the time because I was then receiving a great deal of press in the usual tradition of “isn’t it sad that the old bookstores are failing” type article you can see about once a year in your local newspaper—at least until that medium too is gone. My thesis then was that the failure of bookshops was a common effort by the citizenry, and not to be blamed on a single villain. I have re-posted the Crepuscule on this website—if you are interested.

But with my own novel, HOUND, scheduled to be published in the fall, an article like “Blockbuster or Bust’ raises my graying hackles.

I needn’t bore you at this instant with most of the irrational drivel put forward on January 3rd, but some of it offers a fine opportunity to close in battle. I will post a second piece with greater detail on that article shortly. But such explorations in the tall grass won’t matter to most people. Moral dilemmas often do. And that is where aspiring comes into play.

We all want to succeed in our dreams. I suppose that I should excuse the author of that article for loosing her sense of reason and contradicting herself repeatedly within such a short space. She simply wants to be published again herself.

As she correctly notes, the Wall Street Journal is published by a media giant heavily invested in the “blockbuster” mentality. And she has her own aspirations. Her career is at stake. Maybe her next rent payment. Perhaps even that novel she has been working on for years. How could she turn on the hand that she thinks will feed her?

It is the same reason, of course, that bureaucrats do not blow the whistle on Government waste and soldiers shoot guns at people they have no reason to fear. Every contradiction in that one article represents the kind of stupidity that alternatively pollutes the rivers we drink from and then promotes the idea of political solutions to the weather.

Oh, I hear the gnashing of teeth! Even here in little Abington. Why does he throw in the kitchen sink? Why does he mix such analogies? Well, because the sink is full of dirty laundry. And I like mixed metaphors as well.

The gist of that misbegotten article is this: that publishers must publish blockbusters or else they will fail. Yet that’s the template they have been using for two generations. How’s that working out for them?

I will not quote the foolishness here, nor make more of the moral, aesthetic, or business values of the editor of the Wall Street Journal who allowed it to be published. Read it for yourself. If you do not choke on the bones, you ought not be reading anything on this web site. It’s not meant for you.

I think my life would have been far more copasetic if I had long ago given up the dreams which stir me.

The maroons are in charge of the asylum, but still, I aspire to something more.

Link: Anita Elberse, “Blockbuster or Bust,” Wall Street Journal January 3, 2009.

Ever thankful to those who made the effort before us, with heartfelt apologies to those who are still in the fight and the few who support them–offered upon the closing of Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in Boston.

1. Corporate law (and the politicians, lawyers, businessmen and accountants who created it for their own benefit)–a legal fiction with more rights than the individual citizen, which allows the likes of Barnes & Noble and Walmart to write off the losses of a store in Massachusetts against the profit of another in California, while paying taxes in Delaware–for making ‘competition’ a joke and turning the free market down the dark road toward state capitalism.

2. Publishers–marketing their product like so much soap or breakfast cereal, aiming at demographics instead of people, looking for the biggest immediate return instead of considering the future of their industry, ignoring the art of typography, the craft of binding, and needs of editing, all to make a cheapened product of glue and glitz–for being careless of a 500 year heritage with devastating result.

3. Book buyers–those who want the ‘convenience’ and ‘cost savings’ of shopping in malls, over the quaint, the dusty, or the unique; who buy books according to price instead of content, and prefer what is popular over what is good–for creating a mass market of the cheap, the loud, and the shiny.

4. Writers–who sell their souls to be published, write what is already being written or choose the new for its own sake, opt to feed the demands of editors rather than do their own best work, place style over substance, and bear no standards–for boring their readers unto television.

5. Booksellers–who supply the artificial demand created by marketing departments for the short term gain, accept second class treatment from publishers, push what is ‘hot’ instead of developing the long term interest of the reader–for failing to promote quality of content and excellence in book making.

6. Government (local, state and federal)–which taxes commercial property to the maximum, driving out the smaller and marginal businesses which are both the seed of future enterprise and the tradition of the past, while giving tax breaks to chain stores, thus killing the personality of a city–for producing the burden of tax codes only accountants can love.

7. Librarians–once the guardians, who now watch over their budgets instead–for destroying books which would last centuries to find room for disks and tapes which disintegrate in a few years and require costly maintenance or replacement by equipment soon to be obsolete.

8. Book collectors–who have metamorphosed from book worms to moths attracted only to the bright; once the sentinels of a favorite author’s work, now mere speculators on the ephemeral product of celebrity–for putting books on the same level with beanie babies.

9. Teachers–assigning books because of topical appeal, or because of their own lazy familiarity, instead of choosing what is best; thus a tale about the teenage angst of a World War Two era prep school boy is pushed at students who do not know when World War Two took place–for failing to pass the torch of civilization to the next generation.

10. Editors–who have forgotten the editorial craft–for servicing the marketing department, pursuing fast results and name recognition over quality of content and offering authors the Faustian bargain of fame and fortune, while pleading their best intentions like goats.

11. Reviewers–for promoting what is being advertised, puffing the famous to gain attention, being petty and personal, and praising the obscure with priestly authority–all the while being paid by the word.

12. The Public–those who do not read books, or can not find the time; who live by the flickering light of the television, and will be the first to fear the darkening of civilization–for not caring about consequences.

Thus, we come to the twilight of the age of books; to the closing of the mind; to the pitiful end of the quest for knowledge–and stare into the cold abyss of night.

My mother’s great grandfather was a doctor to Confederate troops. That once seemed quite remote to me, mostly because she never knew him–but he had cared for my grandfather when the boy was stricken with polio, a great killer of the time, and saved him and then raised him as his own so that he may one day see that early airplane. I myself was part of the testing of the first Polio vaccine on Long Island in the Early 1950′s.

Time is relative, not only for the number of forebears you might recall, but because, the human history of things is really so short. As a boy I was fascinated with the Norman Rockwell painting of a family tree, depicting the generations from pirate of the Spanish Main to pirate of Wall Street. I especially liked the unhappy Indian in their midst, because my mother’s grandmother was said to be part Cherokee.

I was never terribly good with math, and so avoided the numbers involved. Now, it impresses me more to consider: it has only been about eighty generations-—80 times my mother’s mother or father’s father–since the blood in my veins bled from the whip of a Roman soldier on the back of a Celtic slave. To say a number like two thousand years makes time unimaginable. But, conjuring eighty of your relatives in a room is not so difficult-—I’ve actually seen that with my own eyes–and then projecting them back in time as if they were standing on each other’s shoulders is more than a great circus act. It actually makes the history that my family has survived more comprehendible.

Only forty generations ago, some of my family fought the invasion of the Normans in 1066, and others fought with them. Less than twenty generations ago a luckless relative of mine–likely indentured–died of fever in the swaps around Jamestown, Virginia. Only five generations ago a penniless Irishman first broke the earth around Lansing, Iowa and prayed for rain.

History is no longer taught in our public schools. The protests of erstwhile history teachers aside, the average high school graduate cannot answer the most fundamental questions about his own past. Social Studies has taken the place of history, and that subject being guided by political concerns more than fact, the comprehension of time has diminished to the narrow spectrum of a single life. I think the great growth of interest in nostalgia with baby boomers–arguably a sign of curiosity about the past–is more a manifestation of ignorance. What we have personal knowledge of is all that matters to a generation steeped in its own self interest.

The caricature of the British blue blood pacing the halls of his country house beneath the portraits of generations brings a another thought to me now. It was an awareness of one’s place in the scheme of things which once made everything possible. Our actions reflected upon our fathers, and our sons. Marriage was an act of blood union. Our carnal tastes had consequences beyond the moment.

The physics of history are still bound by the laws of relativity. This is more than pun and metaphor. Ignorance of the past makes for a more uncertain future. In a world of atomic power and demonic virus, there is no guarantee that we will get to repeat our mistakes as past generations have. The foolish emphasis in schools upon social gratification over fact and logic is appalling, as well as frightening.

Now, studies of mitochondrial DNA have connected all of mankind to a single woman who walked the earth only 200,000 year ago. That’s about 7000 generations. That is the memory of a little more than 2000 grandparents passed on. About the size of a small town.

Issues of cultural identity and heritage are not unimportant. The insistence on a disembodied multicultural awareness in a society quickly loosing its marrow in the rush of history cannot make us stronger. I am half Irish by decent, but American by nature. I take my freedoms to be more than a right to vote. A slave is free to serve. I am certainly a slave if all my freedoms are proscribed.

The overwhelming fact of our short history on the earth is that we have spent the blood of generations to finally achieve a sense of ourselves as individuals. The religious may argue for other definitions–still, the evidence of history surrounds us as much as it flows in our veins. From family to clan, to tribe, to nation to what?—in only a few generations. But if our species has any heritage, it is the will to be free.

Every gesture of familial care is an effort to safeguard the generation to come—the future. Every political deal wrought in smoke and sweat is an effort to preserve what exists—the present. And yet, every child sets out to reconquer the world as if it were only just discovered by themselves—regardless of history. All the pain of a 8000 generations cannot keep a single girl from falling in love.

The nature of us all–each a bit of fragile flesh–is to make the world anew. The tribal law may forbid, the king may order, the general may command, the religion may instruct, but in spite of these fences, we will always stop on our way to taste the apple of knowledge. Whatever God might have shaped us from the clay, he could not have mistaken this one fact. Whom ever judges us on our final day, we have only been what we were made to be.

What desperate or foolish parent of my blood would hire himself to the army of a Norman lord. What ignorant girl would take such a soldier for a husband.

When a thin Scots-Irish boy of my not so distant heritage left home that early morning to see what might be found beyond the mountain, did he comprehend the size of the bear he would have to kill in order to return a heroic provider instead of a fading memory to siblings with their own dreams.

My own children now set out upon the sea of history. They have a better knowledge than most in their generation of the past that is beneath and behind them, and of the power of the tides. And my own nostalgia will soon be flotsam to another generation.

I was reading an article I printed out from Drudge about how the newspapers were dying because nobody was reading them anymore. This was during a break in my own work wherein I bemoan (as in piss and bemoan) the passing of the book and the end of civilization. Earlier I had Googled up statistics on reading and found yet another tombstone statement about how the average American consumes less than a book a year. I wiped my word weary eyes and complained out loud to myself, “Self. You used to read a couple of books a week. Now you read little more than a book a month. Ain’t you part of the problem?”

I don’t take criticism quietly. People say I’m a little defensive. I take the slight and tell myself there is nothing little about it. I replied, “Sure you did. And a newspaper for breakfast as well.”

“Liar!” I protested. “You never read the whole newspaper. You skimmed. And I’ll bet you skipped the boring bits of those books too.”

“Oh, but no, no, newsprint-breath.” I retorted in my best imitation of Ed McMahon, “If a book didn’t hold its own in chapter one or two, I would quit and start another. I learned as an adolescent, that it only counts when you go all the way. When I did read a book, I read it through. But you are correct, sir, about the newspapers. They never really were good enough all the way from the front page headline to the classifieds.”

(Perhaps my problem is this: because only one in ten readers today even knows who Ed McMahon is, it bespeaks of my age even more than my reading habits to bring him into this monologue.) I read poetry everyday. I read parts of books for background reference. I read thousands of words on the screen and I print out from twenty to forty pages of material every day from the web. About 150 pages a week at least. I read pretty much all of this. I chose it, after all. It meets my exact intellectual need of the moment. And it more than replaces the newspapers and books I once read—it surpasses them. I get more excellent writing on a greater range of subject, and I get it when and where I want it.

I said, “So what’s the problem?’

Not so funny I should ask.

Mr. John Donne, a great writer who is practically if not virtually unread today, offered one line which most people know. The one about islands and men. If I read just what I want—that self-selected cream of the literary crop—I have isolated my own intellect in a very crucial way. I know more and more about less and less. I can thus become a brain surgeon specializing in very small brains. Good for mice, but not for men.

The great ‘liberal education’ of Charles Eliot (Charles who? Was he George’s older sister?) was a five foot shelf of the literature which had made Western Civilization what it was. For those who do not respect Western Civilization because of what John Wayne did to it afterward, I would suggest you are a nincompoop (a wonderful word, indeed). But what Eliot understood was that Western Civilization was not a finished work but an ongoing process–less than two and a half thousand years set against a couple of hundred thousand. He knew that our ignorance exceeds our grasp, but we had better reach for that non sequitur quick, because the lion does not sleep tonight. All of that. Only he would not have said it quite that way.

And while Irish immigrants and Minnesota farm boys were dying to end slavery in America (Yes. That was what it was about. Idiot! Don’t start that states rights argument again.) more than three quarters of the world’s population still lived in slavery from Brazil to Russia. Does anybody processed by the American public education system know that? Or would they even care?

Half the population of the world still lives in virtual slavery to this day–that is ‘virtual’ as in, “Eat your rice and shut up. Don’t make a lot of noise or we’ll rape you again. You were supposed to sew two pockets on four hundred dresses today, not four pockets on two hundred dresses. You can eat when you have finished hauling that salt out of that hole of mine.” That kind of virtual. Not the glassy cool of a plasma screen ‘virtual.’

I do not wish for a government edict. Nantes to that. What I suggest is that it’s up to you. No, I mean you. Right. You either give a goddamn or you don’t. If you don’t, why the hell are you reading this? There must be a cgi effect you missed in that last film adaptation of the greatest works of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. If you give a goddamn, you have to read. It doesn’t matter the medium unless you need a massage in which case I suggest you avoid the newspaper classifieds. You need to read broadly and Greatly. You need to read to save your life.

The newspaper can save itself. The New York Times could downsize to the equivalent of the New York Sun back when Francis Pharcellus Church told Virginia O’Hanlon that “love and generosity and devotion” still existed. (And I’m talking about the number of pages, not the size of the pages, you dope.) A smaller newspaper would cost less, and use its editorial expertise to cull the known world for what was really ‘news’ and not just sensation. Britney and Paris would not make the cut. People who think they have the time for sluts do not buy newspapers. The Vietnamese grocer in the Bronx who is standing up to the gang bangers would be there. Small business owners read newspapers, gang bangers do not. The Senator making excuses for why he is not responsible for the votes he made in Congress would get no space for his poppycock, but a factual analysis of the damage of that Senator’s votes to property values in Staten Island would. Property owners read newspapers, and the Senator will only read a newspaper that has him by the throat. And for broader analysis, the paper would index on-line sources and its own website.

Etcetera. A regular newspaper reader of average interest and intelligence could tell Pinch, the old gray lady’s current keeper, more about how to save his rag than a hundred self-important editorial minions. But Pinch won’t ask. He’ll sell short. The New York Times is already yesterday’s news because it has no clue how to compete with the internet and it has no reason to exist beyond the next stock holders meeting. Pinch does not believe in the power of ‘love and generosity and devotion,’ and were he to judge, would have thrown Edmund Gwenn out of the court.

I’m that old. Maureen O’Hara is still my idea of a woman. I must believe in miracles because I believe books will survive. Little screens just can’t cut the aesthetic mustard (or mix a good metaphor). But even when they can, (and I understand they will some day) books will still survive because they are the unfungible, untampered and untempered record of a still vital and growing culture.

So I have this idea. What if they threw an ‘end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it’ party and nobody came? What would my hero be doing at the time?