Dear Derek and others here on Mobile Read,
I'm afraid this must be my goodbye as I'm actually been neglecting the responses to my piece in Huff Post in order to spend time answering your replies. I must dialogue with them now.
I must say that this has been a very interesting experience for me and to a great degree, a failiure. I have not pursuaded anyone. In fact, I may have driven some of you even harder into your corners. I am surprised at the resilience of your positions. You are true believers.
I've gained a broad impression that many of you feel strongly that hi-tech plays, in some fashion, a key role in your life. A great number of you do not seem to care much about what is happening to the book (no, not the downloadable file of text that you read and which I will not dignify with the title of 'book' because it is not a book) or book culture or authors who make their living by the printed word. Not a few among you have expressed at best indifference and sometimes even eagerness to see the book perish alltogether so that you can get on with this wonderful book-free future world that you envision.
So be it. The lines are clearly drawn. I will fight on behalf of the book, bookstores, libraries (of books) and for a world in which children sit in chairs with a bound paper book on their lap, no machines nearby to distract, and read.
Such a place was the Library in the Bronx where I grew up, a place where people were shot (my friends Spider and Chief) or stabbed (my couson Harvey) or intentionally run over (Bobby) or fell in front of subways stoned on cleaning fluid (Rickey Carbona) or died iin their mother's bathrub with a needle in the arm (my cousin Ivy) or ended their lives in Sing Sing (my cousin Dennis) or Rikers Island Prison (yet another cousin, Harvey).
In this world of my childhood where I didn't know from one day to the next if there would be food or if I'd even make it throug a day alive, I went, from ages 10-17 to the local library and sat quietly in a hardback chair, safely esconsed among the bookspines imprinted --as though writ in some glorious ink from smelted gems --with the names of authors, Hemmingway, Mary Shelly, Faulkner, McCullers, Virginia Woolf, Tolstoy, Austen, James Baldwin, Dickinson, and I read, hour upon hour. When I looked up there were reassuring matronly librarians pushing carts of books around: the only visual and emotional sense of safetty that I ever knew. They were relief and safety from the streets outside. I sat among the librarians with their armsfull of books as though they wrere each a mother to me, and felt nurtured by them. safe and protected by their armsfull of books, their quiet poised dignity and clear respect for the books. They made me feel that life was given meaning through these bpoks.
At 5PM, when the library closed, I left with a sense of peace and returned through the streets of screaming sirens, broken glass and roving gangs. It was the only peace I knew. And under my arms,as though carrying away with me this wonderful sense of safety, imagination and decency, I bore home books that I'd checked out. I carried them almost as shields against the dangers liurking all around me.
At home, where I was beaten, and screamed at and mocked around the clock, where there was often nothing or little to eat, I read for solace. I read through tears. I held the books close to me. I slept with them under the covers with me. I touched their pages with hope and wonder. I prayed that someday maybe I could produce books with my names inscribed on them, writ in letters of golden light.
And t I have grown up to see books bear my name. I have kept my promise to the little boy I was. Whether or not I am remembered hardly matters. I have keptmy promise to that kid. And it is, in a manner of speaking, on his behalf, and on behalf of all children who have nowhere but among books to retreat from their rotten lives that I now do battle, to keep such places as bookstores and libraries as the safe havens of sanity that they continue to be for countless others, and most of all, to protect the physical book which is so much more than merely the text it contains but is, to the mind of a child, a shield of the imagination and a prize to be dreamed of and gained despite the hopelessness all around them.
John Locke wrote: "New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common."
I harbor no ill will for anything that was said here. I wish you all welll and bid you goodbye,
Sincerely,
Alan Kaufman
http://www.pen.org/MemberProfile.php/prmProfileID/19319
http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2010/jul/kaufman072409.html