Most of the books in my “library” were bought used or stolen from housemates whose literary tastes I esteemed more highly than their manners or hygiene.  When I open an e-book, where can I find the mysteriously unrelated newspaper clippings, the forgotten bookmarks (bus transfers from distant cities, dry cleaning receipts, sympathy cards from funeral homes), the birthday greetings from 1914, the personal inscriptions from authors (which failed to prevent the recipient from selling or giving away the book: “To Jonathan Culler, This diachronic blasphemy, Paul”), the barely legible drug-induced marginalia, the nameplates and ex-libris signatures (a paperback anthology of Japanese poetry in my possesh once apparently belonged to Andy Warhol’s assistant Gerard Malanga—talk about your fifteen minutes of fame!), the randomly underlined words that could be some sort of CIA code, or even more straightforward Messages from Beyond (found written on a bookmark in my secondhand copy of D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rainbow:” “That Julie chick is truly dazzling.”  And she was too, begob, but unfortunately she didn’t think quite the same of me)?  When I close a book, the words are still there, along with added coffee stains and my futile attempts at marginal commentary, when I turn off a Kindle (Kindle! Does Bezos want us to think of Fahrenheit 451?), the words just disappear, tragically.  Nothing ages in the all-or-nothing Digiverse, it’s either there or it’s not, Time means nothing.  I am not a God, I cannot live there comfortably.

    – James McCaffery (03/20  at  20-Mar 02:19 -05:00)