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…

This reminds me of an exercise from Writing on Religion, a class I took for my BA in the study of religion, taught by Dr. Thomases here at SDSU. We were given a sheet of paper with a few different definitions of “religion,” and asked to pick our favorite. I think I ended up choosing the most inclusive one, but I agreed with all of them to some extent. The point of the exercise was to show the importance of defining religion when we write about religion. We learned about how McDonald’s and Oprah could be considered religious movements. We learned about how the feeling of interconnection people experience at concerts and sporting events is the same feeling people experience at religious services. We were allowed to write about anything in terms of religion, as long as we defined religion in a way that included that thing. It seems like we can do more or less the same thing with books in this class.

In class, we’ve discussed the parallel history of religion and books. We’ve reviewed how the scroll was used to preserve the Torah, how handwritten codices were used to disseminate the Bible, and how the printing press was used to oppose Catholicism and spread Protestantism. Today, the internet can be used to access dozens of translations of the Bible and the Torah, as well as countless interpretations and arguments in favor of or against certain interpretations, not to mention the dozens of other holy texts that exist outside of Judaism and Christianity.

The way we define “religion” also changes what we think is worthy of studying within the framework of religion. Catholic missionaries did not consider the beliefs and practices of indigenous people to be “religion” when they encountered them in the Americas. This made it easier to justify the conversion, colonization, and murder of millions of indigenous people. Today, descendants of the survivors are recovering their traditional ways of knowing. Many have no desire to call these beliefs and practices “religion” because of what that word has been used to justify. And books were a necessary pert of this process.

You, my classmate who is reading this, can define “religion” and “book” however you want, and use them to do whatever you want. So can everyone else. An ideology or an object with the label of “religion” or “book” is not good or bad because of that label. It is not automatically beneficial or damaging, honest or misleading, well-reasoned or thoughtless. However, these terms have gained certain connotations over the centuries they’ve been in use. Think about what feelings and memories come up when you read the words “religion” and “book,” or others that have become quite relevant lately, like, “violence,” “political,” and “empathy.”

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Here are some of the things that come up for me when I hear the word “book:” My mom reading to me before bed as a kid. Staying up late trying to finish another chapter on my own. Libraries, the smell of old paper, how soft the librarian’s voice was when she explained the summer reading challenge that would get me a goody bag and a coupon for the Pizza Hut next door. Being told I read above my grade level. Authoritative, institutional validation of my own personal, mystical epiphanies. Staring at a blank notebook page or Word document, waiting for a Muse.

I’d love to hear what connotations you all have, if you want to use the comments to freewrite.