Last Tuesday in Special Collections, I made a remark to my table about the instability of definitions. It was something like, “The longer I’m in school, and the more I learn how we define things, the more I realize how differently we all define everything. It’s a miracle that we can communicate with each other at all.”
The first chapter of The Book by Amaranth Borsuk reminded me of that, particularly the black pages. Each page offers a different definition of the word “book.” We don’t need to believe all of these different definitions at once to be scholars of books. We need to see them, though, to cultivate our own definitions. One of the main reasons to read and consider all of these disparate definitions is to try to understand that how we define common terms, even ones which feel foundational and universal, might be different than how the people we speak to on a daily basis define those same terms.
If we look only at the definitions on the black pages in this chapter, we learn that a book is specifically a physical, portable language storage tool (2, 8), and a book is as big and fixed in space as an inscription on a monument or a mountain (15, 35), and a book is a highly inclusive and flexible category that can include many different media (15, 22), and a book is a physical support for text, not merely the text itself (29), and a book is not just an object, it’s a technology that evolves with the needs of its users (42), and a book is, “an experience. […] A book starts with an idea. And ends with a reader.” (57). These definitions contradict each other, so the point is not to hold one definition up as the ultimate definition. Readers get to see several options, make up their own minds, and understand that other intelligent people can think something different.
More past the break…
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