The Large Print Edition - by Hal McBride My Nook broke. Actually, I haven’t owned a Nook in several years. I’m told I have a tablet, but I first owned a Nook. My technology vocabulary is very slow to adapt. Whatever I first owned, that label persists over time and similar devices.
I guess it isn’t limited to devices. I’m still having a Coke even if it is a Pepsi.
Books have always been important to me. Initially, libraries were my initial portal to books.
Alas, these days and in constant pursuit of larger and crisper print, I prefer my Nook. No, it is not a matter of preference. I prefer a book to a Nook. Books have a tangible quality that a device will never be able to simulate. You open a book and its smell invades the mind. I can underline meaningful phrases and write in the margins. I never know what future need I might have for the phrase or the thought.
I believe everyone has things they believe they can’t do without. Books are books, even if they are in a personal library on a Nook. My Nook reminds me that books are not their binding, but rather they are the words.
Words. Ken Burns made me realize that recorded words have unique meaning when in his classic documentary, The Civil War, he kept reading from the 1860s diary of the wife of a South Carolina planter and politician, Mary Chesnut. Or Union Major Sullivan Ballou’s incredibly elegant letter to wife, Sarah.
“Lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more.”
If you have never read this letter, Major Ballou wrote to his wife the day before his death at First Bull Run, please do.
Words are never just words. Sullivan Ballou, a lawyer and genuine public servant from New Hampshire thrust into the onset of our bloody Civil War and recognizing his own morality, wrote a letter to his wife that we all wish we could write to our wife.
Again, if you have never read or heard it, please do. You can Google it. I checked. It is read in the first episode of The Civil War.
It is a beautiful December day. It is comfortable on our back porch. I’m told, writing letters has become a lost art. I hope not. I do continue to write a few. I confess, I’m counting the “illustrated rhymers” I write to my great-grandchildren. Letters are letters. Write a few words to a friend.
“I can do things you cannot, you can do things I cannot. Together we can do great things.”-Mother Teresa
