Silverfish and Books
I don’t know why, but all my life I thought writing, and especially writing a book, or a poem, or a letter, or just about anything was a superior activity. So, when I meet people who respond to me when I say I write novels – psychological thrillers – they look puzzled. Like, why would you want to do that? And I, equally puzzled, might blurt back, “Doesn’t everyone want to write well?”
I know how out of touch that sounds, but I still have that reaction.
My house with my husband is a Sargasso Sea of books. All kinds. Book collecting is a really weird thing to do. Because if you have a first edition, signed by the author that has some value, you can’t get your dirty mitts all over the book because it lowers its value. You need to get a “reader,” usually a paperback, which has no value. However, this does add to the Sargasso Sea and creates fodder for those half-inch long flat-bodied, wingless, nocturnal insects called silverfish that eat the glue that binds your books, that zip out of a bookshelf when you might be pulling one out. They are wet-like and disgusting. When disturbed in their nest in your books, they usually flop to the floor to scurry away as you stomp after them with your heavy rubber-soled shoe to escape into some little crevice where they wait for you to give up.
Note about silverfish: they regenerate their lost filaments and antennae within four weeks. They are agile runners, and they avoid light. The female lays sixty eggs at once. They live from two to eight years.
It’s as if all those quadrillion words within all those books are simply rotting away, feeding not only the silverfish, but the elements as well. Why add to the rot?
It seems obvious that early cultures that relied on oral traditions to tell histories, myths, and stories handed down from generation to generation was a better, more economical, and certainly environmentally superior way to pass along wisdom. But no one needs to memorize anything anymore since we have Smart Phones at our thumb tips. And that sort of goes along with the question, why have books anymore?
I’ve asked a lot of writers, especially ones like me who have very little skill at marketing and promoting ourselves because those qualities don’t tend to be part of most writers’ playbook. We mostly write because we can’t not write. And that’s an interesting concept, given that we do most things because we have to – want to – like to – love to – hate to, etcetera. But most of us don’t do things because we can’t not do them.
But if the books aren’t there, out of sight, or waiting to be deleted on tablets, there isn’t that possibility of any given moment you might just pick out a book, open it, and surprise yourself.
The challenge of telling something to others in a compelling way, especially in print, is like making it to the top of the mountain when you thought you might not. There’s a high you can’t explain. But I do believe for many of us who have to write but are rarely satisfied with the result on a day-to-day basis, it would be easier to try to climb a mountain on almost any one of those given days.
And that brings me to the brink of my question that is for myself: Why do I write?
It can take hours and hours to almost get one sentence, or paragraph right, much less a chapter, or whole manuscript for a book. A manuscript that needs editing, which means writing most of it all over again.
There is something about living in the effort, living in the moment of getting to something that not only communicates a story, but if the story is told well and has value, plus entertains a little, and makes the reader think about life – well, that’s a wow! And then there’s the idea of preservation. That’s the narcissistic part, but writers can’t deny it. We want our words saved within reach.
All those books, all those pages, all those words sitting on bookshelves, beam out at us, beckoning: Come read me. And when we do, we’re so often surprised and rewarded. But if the books aren’t there, out of sight, or waiting to be deleted on tablets, there isn’t that possibility of any given moment you might just pick out a book, open it, and surprise yourself.
Silverfish must come from a long line of insects that have been around eating their way through paper since about 4000 years ago when in ancient Mesopotamia when parchment was invented extracted from the plant Cyperus Papyrus. The flaw with that paper was it reacted badly to humidity. The silverfish must have loved that.
But maybe I’m thinking about this all wrong. Maybe the silverfish have known something all along we humans are forgetting, that books are important, and we need to keep them around. After all there is a movement afoot to ban them.
Silverfish remind us to take care of them.