I access texts – I love books.

Computers digest – digitize – words into infinitesimal bits, easy to access (harsh verb: access), reformat, replicate, dispatch. Computers convey me into your moment lickety-split, without censorship or intervention by editors, publishers, vendors. Bless computers!

A twenty-first century phenomenon, this instant intimacy alters the relation between writer and reader, as if we were together in the same room. Just now you are with me in my silent study as vividly as God was when He visited three years ago, or Jane is, asleep in our bed, or Henry, curled within reach on my leather recliner (a favored spot). Cry and I’ll be heard. This is new.

Our relation to authors of books is more decorous, formal. Words in books are not written to gobble. Even the quickest quickie book interposes months between composition and consumption. Words in books last longer – for an author who hits the jackpot, generations.

A book is a thing, not a transmission. You can discard a book – and must now and then – but never without a quiver of regret. A text, by contrast, never dies, but sinks into a depthless sea of bytes from which, if summoned, it can be recalled. Easy availability causes us to value texts less than books: easy come, easy go.

I write for you – now – and for any who may slide me off a high shelf decades hence, puffing off the dust. I do not claim my words merit posterity’s attention, only that’s my target. No word I share is casual. That’s one reason I’ll never “write up” minutes (which should be called hours).

Books to me are souls I want to get to know. I try never to read a book for information which I can glean online. Neither for the stories they recount: stories these days are a dime a dozen; just check what’s streaming if you doubt it. I read to meet the makers behind their words. Why have they chosen this topic, these words? What are they saying beneath what they are saying? How urgent to them is our encounter? Do I feel their love, indifference, contempt, what?

I cotton to authors who give me their all; I offer mine in return. Recently I was browsing a collection of Mark Twain’s fugitive pieces, mostly for magazines. Twain could be a very great writer when he tried, but often he contented himself with clowning. I set him aside, annoyed: Don’t waste my time, sir!

While a book contains text, it’s more than that. It’s its appearance, jacket copy, typeface, paper grade, encomia (coerced or spontaneous?), how it dresses up to say hi. I recoil from shoddy books as one might from a slob. If a book is worth making, it’s worth making right. Otherwise let it be text, heedless of its presentation.

Friends sometimes urge me to lighten up about literature. Why this solemnity when I set pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard)? Can’t I read “for fun”?  Can’t a book just be “a good read”? Where’s the harm in “junk books”?

Words committed to paper are my religion. Do you pray “for fun”? You pray because this commitment, this self-abnegation, exalts and purifies somehow, bestowing on existence a significance and radiance it otherwise lacks. Words on paper make me want to live and waken me to the life around. They harmonize the ruckus into song.

Who can say why we love? Who can contradict a consuming devotion? “What is man but his passion?” asked my teacher, Robert Penn Warren, in a great poem. Books and my loved ones are mine.