The Feel of a Book
My special needs brother’s obsession with the printed book
This is my special needs brother Eric John, the day before his 55th birthday. We are in one of EJ’s favorite places, our family’s woodland cabin in Arroyo Seco, California, very near the north entrance to Los Padres National Forest. The cabin is remote and rustic, with a wood-burning fireplace for heat. It has gas and electricity, and a water heater that works occasionally, but it has no Internet or TV service, and EJ isn’t much of a naturalist, so he sometimes gets a little bored. Luckily, the cabin has a decent library of both hardcover and paperback books, because it turns out EJ is obsessive about the feel of a book. He passes hours upon hours leafing through the books in that modest library, not putting one down until he has laid his fingers on each and every page, then immediately returning to the shelf for another.
What’s interesting about this is that, due to his cognitive handicap, EJ’s reading skills are rudimentary at best, about what you might see in a kindergartner. He can’t read these books, is what I’m saying. Nonetheless, by some papyrusian, Gutenberglious, literous magic, the tactile and optical sensations of the bound book are irresistible to him. He returns again and again, making his choice of book, we can only surmise, based on what he can see and feel: the dominant color on the cover, the numbers on the pages, the number of words in the running headers, or any of a plethora of attributes that only his singular mental acuity can discern. EJ flips through the pages incessantly, calling up some asset of the savant that none of us will ever understand, mumbling to himself, mostly in numbers but also in persistent self-encouragement.
I’m certainly guilty of reading too much into EJ’s behaviors than is realistically warranted, but I sincerely believe that his handicap makes those behaviors more fundamentally human than the premeditated, considered and reconsidered, often intellectualized behaviors of the rest of us. If I were religious — which I am not — I would say he is closer to God than the rest of us, one of the special people who, in ancient times, the Incas chose to revere. I therefore believe that EJ’s obsession with the feel of a book tells us something about the book itself: that it has, in its nearly 600 years of existence, become something fundamentally human, something we may be able to do without, but that we would, at the very least, find ourselves missing desperately were it to suddenly disappear. The end of the printed book has been prophesied for decades, but if the printed book as a simple, tactile object can bring hours of solace to a mind as guileless as EJ’s — no matter the words on its pages, no matter the ideas or stories contained therein — then it will have a useful and at times commanding presence among us for as long as our species persists.
