I live a secret life.
A normal person’s life is lived as a web of relationships with real people. I live a normal life of that sort. But in addition and almost as important to me is my secret life. A secret life lived with an ever-changing cast of fascinating minds and people. A Russian mafia don planning to spill the beans in exchange for a promise of protection and asylum by Britain. ( John Le Carre). Einstein explaining his theory of relativity. A neurotic genius revealing his inner life, no holds barred (Henry Miller ). A Yankee from the nineteenth century transported to King Arthur’s Court (Mark Twain). Amartya Sen gently expounding an idea of justice. And so on.
At any given point in time I am at various stages of reading five or six books. I read them at varied pace. Some take me as much as a fortnight to complete. Some spend themselves on me in a one-night stand. And the characters that inhabit these books I am reading and the writers who write them become, for that period of time, an integral part of my life. I have relationships with them and emotions engendered by them which are as real as anything else in my life.
My secret life however had an in-built governor preventing it from overwhelming me. The books and hence the characters and the writers were scattered around various places in my home and office and at any time and place only a couple vied from my attention. Beyond my library of a thousand books or so, if I had to acquaint myself with a new one meant making a trip to the bookshop that could happen about once a week.
Over the past month there has been an upheaval in my secret life. I resisted the Kindle for many months because I sensed in some corner of my mind the danger. But the latest generation Kindle got so many rave reviews that I gave in to the temptation.
It arrived a month ago. Bound in an authentic leather jacket it sat in the palm like an incredibly light well-produced hardbound book. Open the book and a small screen etched with a tasteful picture nods at you. Put it on and the screen changes to the very page you last were reading. It looks 100% like a well printed page using a magical technology called e-ink (it can only handle black-and-white but then who needs color- we shall leave such frills to that darling of the infantile and the philistine- iPad). But that’s where the likeness of the Kindle to the book ends. As you read a book, on hand literally at the flick of a switch are a hundred thousand or more of them. The result is a permanent invitation to promiscuity, a promiscuity of the mind and the soul, immeasurably more inveigling then that of the body. On the positive side I have one more reason to thank the Almighty for not making me filthy rich. Just imagine my troubles if I had an unlimited book budget!
So here I am joining the ranks of those laid low with technology. I empathize now with the couch potatoes, the mobile fries and the Facebook rats.
So why don’t I, you might say just put away my Kindle, give it away and get back to my previous well-ordered existence?
Are you mad!?
