Never Apologise for Buying a Book.......

The thing about Facebook is you get caught up in the commenting culture and before you know it you've spouted your opinion, cracked a funny, or added to the long list of LOL's. I'm still slightly wary of Facebook and its potential for trivia, gossip, inanity, as well as that immediacy and instant consequence of words too easily posted. I began to think more about this after posting a comment on a friend's page because sshe had just bought a book, and tongue in cheek justifying it because it wouldn;t take up any space, honest!

Being myself a bibliophile, a reluctant Kindle user and a determined accumulator of most things literary, I quickly tapped and typed and posted a sympathetic and morale lifting and guilt dispersing comment ( homily?) - as follows:

" Never apologise for buying a book (My Friend) The great Apostle told Timothy to bring his cloak, and his books and especially the parchments (2 Tim 4.13) - he too needed the solace of words crafted with care to nourish the mind, and the rhythm of syntax to persuade the heart, and the thought of others to enlarge his world. Jings - this rationalisation thing's easy"

Thing is, I actually believe all that tongue in cheek off the top of my head pep talk about the importance of books. Many a time when I've needed solace - whether comfort for sorrow, encouragement when disappointed, diversion when anxious, stimulus when bored - in any case, solace, I have found it in words carefully crafted. Poetry and story, philosophy and biography, theology and art, written and illustrated but in any case gathered between two covers and bound into that miraculously versatile artefact, a book. Whether my mood is interrogative, imperative, indicative or an inter-woven diversity of them all, the rhythm of syntax brings some kind of inner resolution, and the shared thought of an Other "lifts my eyes to the hills, from whence doth my help come", in larger vision of the mystery and perplexity and the demand and the adventure of this so precious and sometimes hard to live life.

And as I write this, I've just finished another book, Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny. The first of her crime novels I've read, and she is good.

All of this is, of course, special pleading, a bibliophile in evangelistic mode and mood justifying his passions and preferences. Yes indeed.

And like my friend, whether overtly or covertly, books find their way regularly into this house. My own ruin became irreversible when online ordering became one click checkout. There's worse things....... 

Comments

[Poetreehugger]

Of buying many books there is no end...I may get that printed on a t-shirt.