The Browser's Ecstasy

          How many times have you told someone that you've been 'lost in a book'? Perhaps not that precise phrasing, but chances are that more than once you've experienced that particular feeling that comes from looking at the clock and realising that hours have passed without you noticing. And when you try to remember what it is that you have read, the book becomes a jumbled mix of events in your mind, like Geoffrey O'Brien says of words in The Browser's Ecstasy, "They come upon me like the patches of hieroglyphs in a tomb." (p.53)

          Words are incredibly exciting things! Of and in themselves they have no meaning or value, but what we create through them is a world of possibilities. Like the hieroglyphs, our words symbolise things to us and create pictures in our minds. Words can be used by everyone but certain ways of using words are more pleasing than others. Those who can manipulate words well are given a revered space in our society and, if they can manipulate the words well enough, a place in our history.

          The Browser's Ecstasy reminds us of this wonderful world of words that we are so easily able to take for granted. Legally, every child in Britain today should have the opportunity to learn and learn to manipulate words, but this precious tool of literacy is often ignored, shunned, or never taught properly.

          Those of us who study English Literature, I presume, do so because of a certain amount of love for words. The joy of our experience of, "I'm lost, I seek, I find, I drop the thread again," (p.53) and that single split-second moment where we feel the book makes perfect and absolute complete sense. Though usually gone the very next moment, this feeling is built from the multitude of connected feelings within the book. And, as The Browser's Ecstasy focuses on, not just the words and feelings within the book, but how these words and feelings connect with the whole world of words that exist in our brains from reading them.

          Personally, though this is not the case for many, I dislike reading two books at once and so I avoid this scenario most diligently. I don't enjoy the mixing of essences of two books, or comparing the one to the other while I'm reading. So if any comparison is to be made it is only after I have read both books to the end. Another thing I dislike is leaving a book unfinished. Unless it is a book I really detest or find incredibly boring, I feel that I am cheating myself if I fail to finish a book. Or, perhaps more accurately, I feel that I cam breaking the contract that I made with the book when I picked it up with the intention of reading it.

          One lovely image in The Browser's Ecstasy is that of, "(eavesdropping) on the murmur of overlapping conversations," (p.54) between books. The idea that somehow these books are alive, that there are billions of possible connections linking them and, by consequence, the human race, is a beautiful one. Words that people have written in the past, words that people will write in the future, all part of a web of shared humanity. You just need to find the right thread.

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O'Brien, Geoffrey, Excerpts from The Browser's Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading. Washington D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000.