Enough About 9-11 ... Let's Talk About Billy

Unless you've been vacationing in a cave in Outer Mongolia for the last few months, you know that today is the tenth anniversary (if the word "anniversary" is appropriate for such a thing) of the attacks that murdered around 3,000 people in New York City, Washington DC, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Because we humans have a thing for commemorating important events, especially on round-number anniversaries, we are being buried in a wave of 9-11 memorial events that began a few weeks ago and culminates today.

Four years ago I wrote everything I needed to write about that terrible day and the day after here and here. If you're interested, go back and read it, and then reflect on what terrible effects can come from the intersection of twisted, rigidly self-righteous religious beliefs and the making of political statements.

If you want more 9-11 stuff, you can find it almost everywhere today. I choose to think about other things. Like changes to bookshelves and what they mean to us.

This article from Time Magazine notes that Ikea, the Swedish purveyor of assemble-it-yourself furniture, is redesigning its classic "Billy" bookcase line to reflect the reality that people don't store and display books any more ... they store stuff on shelves, and books on things like Kindles, E-Readers, Nooks, and any of a gazillion other properly-configured electronic devices.

This, as I've said often enough and many of you have agreed, is sad.

Bookshelves lined with books give character to a room and provide an insight into the interests and life of the person who lives there. When I visit a new friend's home, I generally look at three things first: what's on the bookshelves, what's on the CD rack (and those are disappearing, too, by the way, made obsolescent by digital music players), and what the kitchen is like - whether it's a real working kitchen or one of those "sizzling gourmet kitchens" that real estate agents tout as a symbol of affluence and a place to eat the pizza you ordered from Dominos.

Books are where we store our history and our dreams. Books are made to be held, read, savored, caressed, and even smelled. They have no battery to die, no screen to crack, and no 250-page operating manual (available only in .pdf format on the device itself) to tell you how to turn a page. Electronic readers may be the wave of the future (and I do have an iPad with three electronic reading programs on it - Overdrive, iBooks, and Kindle), but they will never replace the look, feel, and wonder of a real ink-and-paper book.

And if the bookshelves go away, too, we also lose something. We lose the ability to skim the shelves of accumulated books, finding new things to read and getting reacquainted with old friends. We lose the magic and the sense of peace that comes from curling up under a quilt on a cold and rainy night with a good book and a cup of hot chocolate. As autumn arrives and winter waits in the wings, that becomes something of more than academic interest.

The world is moving on. Many things changed (mainly for the worse) on 9-11, and change continues to buffet us as we move into a future shaped by illusions of security and a tidal wave of technology that threatens to take away one of our most cherished activities - the ability to read a real book.

Not to mention having a real library in our own home.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

P.S. - One parting shot about 9-11: I am considerably less worried about what terrorists can do to us than I am about what we are doing to ourselves with the useless and despicable political chicanery going on in Disneyland-on-the-Potomac. Our elected and appointed ass clowns are hurting our future in ways al Qaeda never could. Think about it.

B.