Made of Words

This bookstore is made of words.

The other stores on this street are not made of words. My daughter is making words. She enjoys being Wonder Woman. She says, “What seems to be the problem?” And then she comes to the rescue. But she cannot rescue us from our collective desire for visual stimulation over the written word. Is this a tragedy?

Has our culture switched back to our original mode of information gathering: the visual mode? More likely, our culture never switched to words. Maybe that was only in our imagination. Maybe words were always on the periphery, but word-lovers, over time, became a powerful, highly-educated, and vocal minority.

Imagine the first cave paintings. The original artistic outlet. Or those humans who stared into a reflective body of water. Ripples moving over the image of a face. Then quill and ink and papyrus. The printed word. The Bible. Morse and his telegram in 1844. The first telephone in 1876. Radio waves begin surrounding us. The first time baseball’s World Series was broadcast on the radio. 1921. Franklin Roosevelt and his fireside chats suddenly bring the intimacy of the human voice…guiding the United States out of the Great Depression…into the living room. The television. First black and white. Then magnificent color in the early 1950s. Alongside all of this was the written word. Black on white or cream-colored paper. Newsprint on…