The Solitude of Books
In a world obsessed with conversation, physical books bring us solitude and freedom.
Several years ago, I attended a talk by the Canadian poet Erín Moure. She talked about poetry and translation and writing. It was a talk so full of brilliant insights that, as I jotted things down in my notebook, I struggled to keep up. But after the talk, as I looked back at my hastily scribbled notes, one line stood out:
Books are emigrants. They belong where they end up. — Erín Moure
In a couple of short sentences, Moure managed to conjure something of the essence of why books matter to me, something about the solitariness and freedom this emigrant’s journey implies.
Much of the reading and writing that takes place in the world is conversation by other means. We are the same social primates our ancestors once were, sitting around the camp-fire, exchanging news, gossip and ideas. On social media, in email, by letter (back in the day when people still wrote letters), or writing articles like this one, the act of writing is often tangled up with a hunger for conversation and connection. Writing is a stage in a mutual, shared, back-and-forth exploration of the world. And so if we don’t get something back from what we write—a comment, a like, an upvote, a reply to the letter we sent—we feel as…
