Before words were written, they were spoken. They probably started out as grunts and yelps and growls. Somehow, over time, they became more refined, more nuanced, and started to signify different things. Tree. Arm. Leg. Water. Food. Danger. Man. Woman. Head. Body. Walk. Run. Eat.
The more you think about it, the more crazy language gets. Apparently writing began because we needed to keep track of things– how many grains in this granary, how many cows in the yard, one stroke one cow. And somehow, from those humble beginnings we have the Bible and the Quran and Beowulf and War and Peace and The Great Gatsby and 50 Shades Of Grey.
Why do you read?
Humans were social long before they were individuals. We’re fundamentally tribal. We live in groups. Have you seen a newborn giraffe? It’s walking around happily just minutes after dropping out of its mother, like a strange alien egg-beast. Have you seen a newborn human? It’s utterly useless. Soft, crumpled, fragile, weak. Humans take years and years of development before they become even remotely functional. It takes a village to raise one.
It’s interesting to look at our nearest cousins on the tree of Life– the great apes– and see how they function. Mothers carry their children close against their breasts. Warmth. Protection. Love. As they get older, they start playing and fooling around. Rolling around in the grass, swinging around in the treees. Then there’s grooming, how they clean each other, resolve conflicts, strenghen social bonds. And they hunt and eat together.
Robin Dunbar, the guy who came up with Dunbar’s Number, suggests that spoken language becomes a cheaper way of doing social grooming. That’s what small talk is all about. We’re not really talking about the weather, we’re just sharing a frame. When you look at it this way, things like religion, sports teams, and really, most of the media, all start to make a little more sense. It doesn’t matter what we’re looking at. What matters is that we’re looking at it together.
What about writing, then? Writing started out for practical reasons, but somewhere along the way we used it to express ourselves. No doubt we were singing and dancing long before we had words to write, but the written word endures beyond the present moment.
What are books? They’re little bundles of paper, made from dead trees and imprinted with carbon black. It’s people taking their inner thoughts and perspectives, working really hard to reshape them and represent them in the form of ordered squiggles (with burnt tar!) on a piece of paper, so that others might reinterpret those squiggles and recreate those inner thoughts and perspectives themselves.
Words are signposts that allow for the representation of ideas and the transmission of knowledge. They’re part of a vast, ancient human endeavor, the production of language and meaning. Billions of people have been working on it for trillions of man-hours. When you read, you’re breathing in that process.
I read because it makes me a part of humanity. We live in cities now, and one of the deep tragedies of city life is that we don’t properly get to feel like we are a part of the Earth. We don’t always get to enjoy the splendor of the open sea or marvel at the shimmering stars in the night sky. But language, that’s something we can always dive into. Every word has thousands of years of history behind it. It’s been through the minds of countless people, and been morphed and remixed and fallen in and out of fashion before it reached our eyes, our fingers, our minds, our tongues.
Books are mind-altering substances. I read because life is a hell of a trip, and books help me to recognize that. I read because books take me out of my own boring point of view and allow me to see through the eyes of another. To walk a different path. To think different thoughts.
What’s the point of all of that? Well, life is short and we’re all gonna die and the Universe will decay to a lukewarm nothingness. In the meantime, we’re given tickets to this really odd amusement park. And we could either just sit around and wait for the park to close, or we could go on the rides. If you have 10 hours in an amusement park, why ride the same ride over and over? Why spend all of it sitting on the bench? Well, you could if you really wanted to, but why?
I read because it’s interesting. I read because boredom is frustrating and painful. I read because I need wonder in my life in order to convince myself to persist. The promise that tomorrow will be more interesting. Even YESTERDAY becomes more interesting when you have a new way of looking at it. You reinterpret the data. When you meet old friends, you have new stories to tell, new perspectives to share, and you can watch their eyes light up. “I’ve never heard anybody put it that way before,” they’ll say.
I read because I am alive, and I live not just as an awkward individual flitting around anxiously in meatspace, but as a wave in the vast ocean of human thought and consideration, in idea-space. I read to be a part of a conversation in which I fit, in which I am relevant, in which I get to choose how I want to connect the dots. Where I get to have my favorite scientists and artists and philosophers and rockstars and everyday folk all in a dinner party in my head, and I don’t need to worry about all the meatspace and meatbag considerations like what to feed them or how much they should drink.
I could also theoretically just watch videos and hang out on social media and such, and lately there are some videos that are very beautifully crafted– so much so that I think it’s worth calling them books.
Does that sound a little forced and outdated? If it does, I think it’s because you’re not thinking far back enough. Since the printing press, the term “book” has meant “written document”. But why? It comes from the Proto-Germanic “Bokiz”, with cognates “buch” and “buche”. Beeche. Part of this is from beechwood tablets on which runes were inscribed, but it possibly also refers to trees themselves.
A book is a tree, both literally and figuratively. It’s a fractal representation of human thought, giving fruit and shelter to who seek it. Branching outwards, rooted firmly in Earth, grasping towards the light.