The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

But what a sweet story it is! And in the end, to us, that’s what really matters. That’s what books are for, after all, to tell your stories, to hold them and keep them safe between our covers for as long as we’re able. We do our best to bring you pleasure and sustain your belief in the gravity of being human. We care about your feelings and believe in you completely. But here’s another question: Has it ever occurred to you that books have feelings, too? As you listen to this romantic tale of two ill-fated lovers, do you ever stop to wonder about what it feels like for us? Because, in truth, if skin marks the border where an I ends and a you begins, then in these moments of impassioned boundary crossing called love, we envy you. It’s that simple. We envy you your bodies. How can we not? Books have bodies, too, but ours lack the organs needed to experience the world. The skin that covers our boards and encloses our words is different from yours. Our skin, whether made from paper or parchment or cloth (or, these days, some combination of plastic, glass, and metal), fulfills a similar function of marking our perimeters, but even the most haptic and capacitive of our skins cannot experience pleasure the way yours can. We cannot feel the ecstasy, the merging of self and other. Oh, sure, you can say that acts of literature are a kind of impassioned boundary crossing, too, but literary acts are inherently disembodied, more notional and distributed. We rely on you to embody us, and...