If you have to argue someone into seeing how superior a book is to an electronic gadget, youre never going to win that argument. But if you do choose to make such an argument, you might begin by saying that a book is a sensual object, a generous clairvoyance, like an elegy of snow, or a palomino doing handsprings down the sidewalk. It does not need batteries, signal, click wheel, account, flash memory, digital rights management or global positioning system, and does not need to be plugged into anything. If you bring that one book with you to the beach, to work for a lunch break, carry it on a plane or pack it into your suitcase, you will only be able to access that book.

The ability to access an unlimited number of books, blogs, bogs, slogs, frogs, ezines, bee zines, enchiridions, periodicals, articles, particles, or farticles on a single device is eminently convenient, but leads, inevitably, to superficial flirtations, bits of flimsy data that never cohere, never synthesize like a polymerase chain reaction into the strand of a thought, or the protein of an idea. Some books are easy to disappear into but many books require a cooperation that rigorously exercises on ones capacity to focus. So that whatever making goes into the making of the book will make you wonder at what a wonderful thing a book is. Especially by comparison to a clothes iron, or a tv, or a set of patio furniture. The book opens, and a skeleton of sound dances from page to page in an astronomy of ink.

I would love to see a tornado leap out of a book and capitalize on the turbulence of its spectral cartilage, turning electronic gadgetry, laptops and cell phones and ipods and kindles into cataclysms of doubt and speculation. A tornado of thought a big whirling column of air a disaster on the ground throwing debris around and around like the chaos of thought in somebodys head. Word to word in a syntax of slippery association ideas engorged with ink constellations of thought embedded in warm paper and dark spines of golden titles. Gravity and books go hand in hand we live in a universe of weights and spatial relationships, sensations, secretions, perceptions, a physical world is what i am getting at, a world in which it feels good to have a body, inhabit a body, affirm a body, even when it ages and creaks and wrinkles its better to have a body than walk around without one. Is that what a ghost is? a personality who has forgotten their skin, bone, glands, needs, desires? an eidolon without hair? muscle? proprioception? society can do that to people. Not just routine and monotony and the chronicles of our lives told in the pull of cables and grease but the denial of impulses the killing of instincts. Ones brain arranges a thought to form patterns and finds that the color of despair is a stained glass window full of parables and angels, that it is possible to decorate your anguish with cathedral glass, dimes of moisture intriguing as mirrors, wisps of incense spiraling upward in languid curls, a pair of lips producing animals of sound.

I open a book and find a realm of wilderness, a sweet chunk of living cognition erratic and rich as the jungles of borneo, a clod of earth teeming with seeds and worms. In the trobriand islands, a magician lays an assortment of herbs down on a mat, then covers that with another mat, to make a kind of magical sandwich. Then he recites an incantation into it, holding his head close so that nothing escapes the movement of his breath, but is stirred by it, because the magic of the incantation, the magic of the words, is in his breath. I admit, i am tempted to buy a kindle because it would be nice to be able to read under the covers when my wife is trying to sleep. Certainly better than trying to hold a penlight and maneuver the pages of a book.

But when i read something on a screen, i do not feel private, i do not feel autonomous or unrestricted, i do not feel independent in my thinking and reflections. The medium is the message, and the medium in the instance of anything electronic is highly public. When i think of books i think of them housed in magnificent libraries with spiral staircases and gargoyles dribbling the liquor of heaven.

Women in illumined solitudes like the women in the dutch paintings of the 17th century, vermeers maiden holding a letter in pensive discrimination. When i read a book, especially a large, fairly hefty book, i feel that i am inside something. I feel that my interior self, the one i choose to keep out of the public light and its scrutiny, is at liberty to roam. It never ceases to amaze me how complicated life can be and it is for that very reason that i prefer the astonishing simplicity of a book.

One cannot fail to feel the warmth and fiber of a book, its infinite variety of shape, and grain, and cloth. We can lift a perception into the world by scrawling it into the sand with a stick by the side of the ocean. But it is not the frenzied bowing of the violin and its intricate notes that we hear when we find deliverance in the stirring of pages. The tongue unrolls the word accordion and an accordion unfolds making accordion sounds.

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All this can go into a book with the same felicitous fit as a willow delineating druids and shadows by a tumbling brook. If you need to explain to someone why the direct rays of the sun feel better than the heat emanating from a steam radiator, or why the crackling gold of a campfire is more delicious to the skin than the heat coming from a baseboard heater or vent on the floor, then you will never convince that person of anything because that person is dead. A ghostly realm of ephemeral passages, wisps of knowledge, gossip, rumor, chat, fleeting communications that glow without bone, shine without substance. Could it be that the juggernaut of digital communication is more than a matter of novelty and convenience? perhaps this is the most apt medium for a language drained of meaning. Politicians say one thing while campaigning, then, elected, do just the opposite.

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There is often no correspondence between what is claimed, and what is actually experienced. One day i pulled a meaning out of a word i did not expect and it grew into an orchard of fruit, peaches and plums swollen with light, a larynx extending the granite of a wooded solitude. There is an authenticity in heft that cannot be paralleled among the pixels of a computer screen.

There is more scrupulous attention, sweat and devotion, to what goes into a book than what gets floated on a screen. Even if what is written is utterly silly once its in a book its there and you cannot get it out unless you burn the book. I dont know which group prefers reading books to burning books but it doesnt really matter. Its not like a conversation where any opinion can get floated and it wont matter, even if youre on television or the radio you can always deny what you said or say youve been misinterpreted. A generalization in a book will need an index and footnotes and an appendix and a pancreas and a stomach to digest it all.

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Which is why it feels so good in the hands and yields so wonderfully to the fingers. You dont have to mess with a cursor or crash or scroll anything down like you are possibly doing this minute. Given the era in which shakespeare lived, in which christianity had so much sway, a time not unlike the one we are now in again, another slide into the dark ages with ignorant, superstitious people antagonistic toward blaspheming intellectuals and the laboratories and scalpels of science.