“Fresh From Ganymede! § What Is A Book?”, 2020-12 (; similar):
…What is a book?
I’m fond of Craig Mod’s argument that what makes a book is its edges, and to that I will add: a book requires collimation.
I mean that in the optical sense; a beam of light is said to be collimated when all its photons are pointing in the same direction.
Most light on Earth is uncollimated, because most light is produced by big radiant objects made up of a huge number of particles, each tossing off photons at different times, in different directions. The writhing glow of a campfire is textbook uncollimated.
Here I unfurl my analogy, mwa ha ha: I think the kind of writing and thinking people do on the internet—on news websites, on social media, in email newsletters—is like campfire light, or the light of an incandescent bulb. And that’s great! Who doesn’t like a campfire? Who doesn’t want a light in their kitchen?
That kind of light blooms wide… and fades fast.
Collimated light is different. It doesn’t scatter and diffuse into darkness.
The light that reaches us from stars is collimated, but only by accident; we see such a narrow needle of any star’s roaring output that the photons are effectively coasting parallel.
The more illustrative example is the laser, which manufactures collimated light. Most lasers (all?) have two mirrors inside, and only photons that have bounced straight between them are permitted to exit and become part of the laser’s beam.
This kind of light can make its way through the gulf of space, or burn a hole in the wall.
So, I think writing a book requires collimation: getting your material pointed in the same direction, filtering out the bits that wander elsewhere. I don’t mean to suggest that a book, fiction or nonfiction, ought to be just one thing; some of the very best feel polyphonic, full to bursting. But I’d argue that, in those cases, it is full-to-bursting-ness that provides the axis of collimation. The material has been aimed at that objective.
A book is a laser beam.
The ecology of publishers and bookstores and libraries all assist in this collimation, by the way. Maybe they’re like the mirrors in the laser, bouncing a book back and forth, back and forth, powering it up…
There is a sense I think a lot of people share: that their contributions to social media, even if they are bit-by-bit rewarding, don’t really add up to much. A sense of all those words just… burning away, like morning mist over a pond. And: I think that sense is correct!
Collimation is available whenever you sit down to clarify your intentions and organize your material, in any medium, including, like, wood. I don’t know that the internet resists these processes, exactly… but it sure does reward the bonfires.
For as much as I enjoy sending this newsletter—and I enjoy it a lot—its satisfactions do not compare to my books, which are, if not quite laser beams… well, they point in a direction. They have been my first glimpse of a longer game.
And this is why I do the Gawain thing, too. It’s a chance to align myself, astonishingly, with all this poem’s other readers, 10 years ago and 50 and 400; to sit inside the beam of the book.
The key, for me, is the unbroken line of light. 😉
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