We read constantly online and understand less and less. Books counter the incessant digital noise with their quiet power – which is why they are indispensable. A call to reading beyond simple browsing
Wolfram Weimer, the Minister of State for Culture, recently faced a wave of criticism when he initially rejected the expansion of the German National Library in favor of digital archiving. Although he has since signaled that the expansion could happen, it sparked a debate about the role of books in a digital world.
It is not a question of a lack of text and information. On the contrary: we live in a present, where thousands of words bombard us every day. We cannot escape them when we look at our smartphones, while the radio and television are on in the background, the neighbor joins us in conversation, our best friend sends us a voice message of several minutes. Podcasts, posts, comments, emails, the latest news – everything is there immediately, always, everywhere. This at a time when something important remains crippled: the experience of real engagement with a thought.
Books don’t fall prey to this rhythm. They take time. Simply by their nature, they demand attention. They weigh a lot, they’re bigger than smartphones, the pages can’t be wiped with a finger, and they don’t need batteries, no power source, to reveal their content.
“FIRST DESIGN LEAGUE”
Author and cultural scholar Frank Berzbach describes the special relationship between people and books in his essay “The Art of Reading”: “Books belong to the first league of design (…). They caress the hand when you touch them, they are a pleasure for the senses. They have a scent, a texture, we react to them with an aesthetic sensation.”
What exactly is this feeling? What fascinates us about books? It’s not just the story that is read inside them. It’s the whole package. Holding a real book in your hand, feeling it – some pages are so thin that simply turning them over becomes a sensory experience – when you smell them and notice them, reading becomes an exclusive pleasure. Because the moment we reach for the book, we stop. And we reserve what we now often perceive as a luxury: time.
SENSITIVE TASTE
It’s comparable to a gramophone record: when you carefully take it out of its case, place it on the gramophone, gently lower the needle, and hear the slight crackle before the first notes sound – this allows us to perceive music more consciously than when a playlist is streamed to a Bluetooth speaker.
“In an age of calculated scripts, endless TV series and video games, reading a classic 19th-century novel is revolutionary,” writes The Art of Reading. When you read these words, the idea of reading Emily Brontë’s “The Heights of the Tempest” or Theodor Fontane’s “Effi Briest” seems incongruous. The beauty of the language, the choice of words, the structure of the sentence take us back to a time when the world was calmer than it is today, life moved more slowly and thoughts had more space.
But even contemporary novels cannot be read casually. It is almost a waste to read them in a hurry while waiting in line or between meetings. The same goes for nonfiction books that convey knowledge, well-founded and carefully researched. No algorithm interferes, no digital feed distracts you, no notification interrupts you. A book does not involve us in discussions that we do not want to have – as happens with a random post on Instagram. And that is why books are also places of silence.
LIBRARIES AS PLACES OF SPIRITUALITY
Just like libraries are designed to be. When you enter one of these temples of books, a special silence surrounds you. Light whispers, low voices, the rustling of book pages; every now and then someone moves a chair, a floorboard creaks. There is a characteristic smell.
You immerse yourself in a world that seems to have stopped. And together with everyone else who browses here old and new books, magazines or photo albums, you create a small, close-knit community. A community of those who believe that they can find more answers here than on the Internet. Seen in this sense, libraries are also places of spirituality.
MIRRORS OF OUR PERSONALITY
You can take this experience home with you, on your bookshelf. There, we see not only colorful covers, but also traces of our thinking and development. Over the years, a very personal order is created from paperbacks read many times, from carefully selected new releases and long-forgotten finds. Books that have shaped us. That we have read several times. Or that are still waiting to be read to the end. Perhaps this is the biggest difference with the digital world: a book does not disappear, it remains. And sometimes you pick it up again – out of curiosity, out of longing, or simply because it is there. Author Frank Berzbach expresses this with a simple sentence: “He who lives with books always has a home.” (DW)