The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

Is it odd to see a book within a book? It shouldn’t be. Books like each other. We understand each other. You could even say we are all related, enjoying a kinship that stretches like a rhizomatic network beneath human consciousness and knits the world of thought together. Think of us as a mycelium, a vast, subconscious fungal mat beneath a forest floor, and each book a fruiting body. Like mushrooms, we are a collectivity. Our pronouns are we, our, us.

WHAT MAKES A PERSON want so much? What gives things the power to enchant, and is there a limit to the desire for more? Books are intimately familiar with questions like these; they constitute the DNA of your oldest human stories, expressed in the tales our pages tell of jealous gods and gardens, talking snakes, and sweet, irresistible apples.

Great question

And what about the troublesome matter of more? For most humans throughout history, “more” wasn’t even an option. “Enough” was the goal and was, by definition, enough. The Industrial Revolution changed all that, and by the early 1900s, American factories were pumping out more goods than ever before, while the newly empowered advertising industry used its forked tongue to convert citizens into consumers. But even as this new economy boomed, there were signs that growth was slowing, and these same questions began to niggle in the minds of American industrialists. What makes a person want so much, and is there a limit to the desire for more? Or, put another way, is there a point of saturation at which the American consumer would have enough, leading to the collapse of the market?

History Of consumerism

On December 7, 1972, the Apollo 17 astronauts took a photograph of a gibbous Earth at a distance of eighteen thousand miles from its surface. The photograph showed the planet, partially obscured by swirling clouds, floating all alone like a blue glass marble in the vast, black infinity of outer space. This historic image, dubbed the Blue Marble, became a symbol of the environmental movement and caused a profound shift in the way people conceived of the planet, shrinking it from something incomprehensibly immense and awesome into a fragile, lonely orb that you could cradle in the palm of your hand or crush beneath a careless heel. Even as the Blue Marble was miniaturizing your conception of Earth, it was inflating your sense of importance in relation to it, endowing you a godlike perspective and agency. The image caused, in other words, a derangement of scale, from which you people still suffer. As your anxiety about the disastrous effects of your behavior on the biosphere grows, you console yourself with the thought that by changing a light bulb or recycling a bottle or choosing paper instead of plastic, you can save the planet. Not you, personally, Benny. We’re not saying that you console yourself with thoughts like these. But derangement of scale might explain why, when you take the Aleph’s snow globes and hold them in the palm of your hand, weighing each small world against Annabelle’s fancy, you find them at once so charming and so unsettling. BENNY

Sad human truth

All we know are the thoughts that arise in the wake of bare experience, like shadows, or echoes, giving voice to what no longer is. And after these thoughts become words, and words become stories, what is left of bare experience, itself? Nothing, the monk might say. All that remains is story, like a molted exoskeleton or an emptied shell. But is that really all? We books would say no, that story is more than just a discarded by-product of your bare experience. Story is its own bare experience. Fish swim in water, unaware that it is water. Birds fly in air, unaware that it is air. Story is the air that you people breathe, the ocean you swim in, and we books are the rocks along the shoreline that channel your currents and contain your tides. Books will always have the last word, even if nobody is around to read them.

Beautiful. What are we without stories?

Around him on all sides, towering reams of blank white paper rose up like ghosts, waiting for words to be impressed upon them. They were like people without faces, lining up to receive their eyes and ears and mouths and noses.

Blank pages

So thank you for noticing, and thank you, too, for what you said just now: I knew you were mine. These are words every book wants to hear, and they sent a tremor of delight down our spine.

I knew you were mine.

How weeding and raking the moss in the garden helped me understand that what’s important is not finishing a task but rather just doing it, completely.

Tidgying is love