After a weekend that included Lee's folks staying with us and a big family dinner to coincide with the visit, we found ourselves alone and doing a bit of shopping to finish off the weekend. As you may know Lee is an educator and a Director of a large child care facility. As such, she is always on the look-out for educational materials and books for the Center, and of course for our grandchildren. So there was a quick suggestion that we head over to Borders Book Store.
If you've been following the business news lately you know that Borders is finally going out of business after years of struggling to stay afloat. Last year they closed about one third of their national chain of stores. That was not sufficient. So a few weeks ago Borders announced that the entire chain was closing down with amazing deals to be had until everything was liquidated. Being very astute shoppers, we joined the pack to pick over the bones of this failing enterprise- and had some success. Both the grandchildren and the students benefited from our outing.
Whenever an establishment has a going-out-of-business sale these places seem to have a different kind of energy. There is an urgency to shopping that you usually don't see- particularly in book stores. One of the great things about book stores is the laid back atmosphere of people browsing and seeming more cerebral, polite, and content. Not so this time. Eyes were darting and scanning the quickly emptying selves, while hands were at the ready to grab that last edition if your brain gave the signal to pounce. Everybody had their game-face on.
I was mostly along for the ride, so I had a chance to think about book stores in general, which led me to thinking about the future of the written word. I was a bit sad at first to think that Borders' fate was a harbinger of the fate of all bookstores. It's kind of a sad trend to have books disappear, but it seems that's the direction. I'm not a great reader myself (mostly because I'm a slow reader) but I've always felt that books were venerable and honorable instruments to be preserved and respected. But, as I watched this place of venerable objects take its last dying breaths, being devoured by bargain hunters, I realized this isn't the death of the written word. I realized this is just the transformation of the written word to another form.
I thought about the first of these blogs, called "Getting Started". In that poor beginning I talked about my initial resistance to the notion of Blogging because it seemed to run afoul of my ideas about full expressiveness in the written word. But I accepted that writing isn't disappearing- its just showing up in different ways. Take newspapers as another example. They, like the bookstores, are dying. I've concluded they're dying because it's their time to die. They only come out once a day and anything new they had to impart showed up the day before in the digital world of the Internet. All the great journalists have migrated to the new electronic mediums. The newspapers that still exists have devolved into a collection of advertising. As a news source, they're obsolete. Books stores, in general, won't last much longer either. A book, in fact practically a whole library, can be downloaded to a Kindle or a Nook or some other devise instantly though the airwaves, and stored in your pocket.
We have progressed to new technologies in almost every aspect of our lives. To mention only a few: Motorized vehicles with incredible technological wonders transport us instead of animals. The smoke house, the root cellar and the canning jar have been replaced by refrigeration. Entertainment is now nearly unlimited via the satellite and the cable. Practically the entire store of human knowledge is available with the touch of a finger to a computer. Medical science and technology has extended life (for some) of the human race to unimagined lengths.
When it comes to the written word and the imagination of man, I don't worry. I see some keepers of the human experience dying (like the book stores) but I know the new forms will surely come to replace them and will probably be even better. In the end, it's not the form-but the substance of expression that will always move us forward. So anywhere we can use writing to describe beauty- tell a story- expose injustice- inspire us- or elevate our spirit, writing will find a way to be there for us. Writing is the ordering and the recording of ideas- an expression of the human experience. Writing itself will never go-out-of-business.
Thanks for looking in.
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