Warren Zevon’s continued exclusion from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a travesty. I wouldn’t throw that word around carelessly. If you’ve never sat down and really listened to a Warren Zevon record, I suggest you do so as soon as possible. You could mark off one hour better spent than watching sitcoms. Though I don’t think Zevon would knock sitcoms, he probably would have pointed to all the life happening off-screen.
Warren Zevon died in 2003 of mesothelioma, but not before recording one final album, The Wind. VH1 produced a short documentary about the making of the album. Work commenced soon after Zevon’s diagnosis. Doctors predicted he wouldn’t last three months. The word “deadline” has rarely weighed so heavily on an artist. As Warren’s health disintegrated, he struggled to finish all the songs. One particularly tough day in the studio, Warren said, the morphine slurring his usual patter, “I haven’t been reading at all lately since my diagnosis. My [unintelligible] Schopenhauer said, ‘we love to buy books because we believe we’re buying the time to read them.’ Isn’t that grand?” Apparently Zevon is misquoting Schopenhauer here—any philosophy aficionados out there with a source? Whether a Zevon original or bona fide Schopenhauer-ism, the quote cuts to a problem for historians of the book. Why do we buy more books than we can read now or even intend to eventually?
For book collectors like Walter Benjamin, books possess a value beyond the stories and knowledge held within their covers. In his essay “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin references Anatole France’s rejoinder “to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France” “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?” A book’s value may lie in its beauty, its rarity, a wonderful memory it evokes, or its special place in a collection. A bookshelf with one empty slot is a pathetic and yearning sight. The bibliophile wants to fill the missing spaces in his personal library. Otherwise, the ache rings like a sore tooth, rotten and pockmarked with cavities, that begs a good suck.
What will the world look like once we have lost all our books? That future that looks likelier with every passing digital edition and e-reader. Of course, we would be remiss to ignore the political promise of such a future: the possibility of truly free literature, a global library open to all readers, and a symmetrical distribution of information. But I think we would also be hasty to dismiss the real pain that we will all suffer when the last book collapses into fragments like paper moths. If we love to buy books because we believe we’re buying the time to read them, how will the disappearance of the book change our relationship to time? Zevon and Schopenhauer suggest that books serve as insurance against entropy. Time passes on, but the promises we make to ourselves, the vows to read the books we’ve bought, persists. Each volume represents a specific parcel of leisure: an hour for The Hunger Games, two for The Catcher in the Rye, and for especially fat stuff, maybe Melville, a day or two. We use the books we’ve bought to measure the time we have left. Of course, that measurement is a delusion. How could we ever predict the hours of books tumbling down our personal timers? But by converting the abstract and the immeasurable into concrete objects, we assure a certain peace of mind. In a world without books, we will become unstuck from those blocks of text and glue. We will be left to wander without the security of the hours we’ve promised to ourselves. In our virtual lives, our experience of time will not be measured in pages, chapters, or finished novels. Instead, we’ll drift in a flow of data, joyful and ignorant of the time we’ve spent. Entire lives will evaporate in an endless afternoon surfing the web.
Perhaps it is a marvelous opportunity, this unraveling of the knots tying our lives to mere objects. Are books but objects, though? The really uncomfortable fact of book collecting is that the “book as commodity” transforms the book’s content into a price tag. When we give up books, we will be able to complete the circuit of exchange. We will trade time for knowledge; we will loose our days into ether to set knowledge free.