Books and Reading and Street Sounds

The library was filled the other day when I returned my books. I was the only person with a book in hand. Every person at the reading tables faced a computer, and almost all of those computers showed the familiar profile of Facebook.

For all of the focus and silence of reading, there is something less disconnected from other people about a person reading a book than about a person working on a computer. It is the same as the difference in relative realness between a long and intimate email and a short hand written note received through the mail. Interacting with the physical lends strength to physical living? Perhaps.

Perhaps it is that there is something innately comforting in the sight of a person interacting with something that is as tangible as a body. Or, that there is something discomfiting in the sight of a person interacting with something that is by definition bodiless.

The street outside is filled with the sound of shouting people. There are only three of them, but their voices are traveling through my windows with the force of a home run. There is goading and insulting and every now and then a conversation in the alley drifts across the others and I am confused, combining conversations into: “I’m walking in the alley, man!” “Are you gonna buy this?” “Where’d he go?” “Come out here! I’m on the porch, I can’t see you!”

It is all very not of me, and all very human, very physical, very much happening. The streets outside my building are quieter than I think they ought to be given the number and variety of people who inhabit these buildings and homes. A woman I spoke with suggested that once inside after supper, everyone goes to the Internet and just stays there. I don’t know if that’s true, but it could very well be. The streets are thus emptied of conversations and giggling and secrets and people walking and I don’t know if anything has taken their places. From what I hear it is quiet.  But like I said, it is really quiet.

I’ve been thinking about the dangers of isolation – about how you can go crazy always being in one place talking to almost no one else. Paranoia is easily spread in people who have no experiential proof of an outside that is not filled with cutthroats and gangsters. The more paranoid people become, the less likely they are to venture out. And the outside has room for the violent and disturbed because there is no one to provide the kind of social pressure that’s needed to keep that behavior out of the realm of public interaction.

It’s an old social dilemma. What city street has not known violence? What neighborhood has not feared for its children and elderly? How do you keep the crime off the streets where it is socially disruptive and lends to damaged people leading lives outside of a sustainable community?

Pretending that there is a way to end crime is extremely naïve and unsettling. Humans are asshats and always have been. The best you can hope for is a strong community ethic that does not have to rely on Community Contracts or fascist walled neighborhoods and prohibitive rules of behavior developed from advertisements for socially conscious economically irresponsible upper middle class families. I may not dig being poor (low-income, baby) but I have more freedom of movement and less social restrictions on my travel and activities than I remember having when the world I moved in was less, um, economically restricted.

I’m thinking that I may start going to the library just to read. I’ll pick out a book that may or may not be there the next time I go, and I’ll take notes in one of my little books for that purpose, and I’ll just read. I will be a human body interacting with a textual body in a place filled with other human bodies living their lives.