A Storied Book

I borrowed a book (yes, a physical book) from the library the other day and discovered, while leafing through it to find my place (the irony is not missed), a couple pages with the telltale ruffling of dried tears.

Far be it from me to prescribe a medium for storytelling, but I couldn't help reflect on how a digital book could never have connected me to another person as viscerally as finding those rippled leaves that succinctly told a whole other meta narrative.

And if, as David Foster Wallace once believed, all storytelling is a struggle to overcome our dejecting solipsism, I would endorse those ruffled pages as being quite a successful story, one seemingly exclusive to the physical medium of a book.

So for all the favorable conveniences of digital literature, physical print media still seems to hold all the powerful sentimental arguments—unless of course those were just the drool stains of a drowsy reader, in which case—fuck.