This is actually rather cliche. This has been the mantra of the well-read now for years, but we don't stop all that often to examine the implications. What does it mean for a culture to spend and spend for instant big-screen gratification, while all the while admitting that is pales in comparison with the written word? Imagination is the first place to start. There is this preconception in this world we now inhabit that imagination is actually an unproductive thing. When somebody says, "He has quite the imagination" it usually isn't a compliment. They mean that the person in question (especially if he or she isn't a child) needs to get with the real world. The real world, as Hollywood sells it, is full of explosions and beautiful people full of super powers in beautiful, or at least impressive, settings. Sometimes the real world is actually like that; and sometimes it's not.
Books inhabit a place that is at once more relate-able and more imaginative for their audience, but (and here's the key) it takes effort to get there. Imagination is something that requires not just absorption but relationship with the words on the page. It's a rare movie that creates a relationship between the audience and the characters or the scenery--it is not impossible for any art to get there but movies have a particularly difficult task. The biggest barrier, in fact, may be time. A relationship takes time. Love at first sight may be real, but it is certainly rare and impossibly more complicated than it ever appears from the outside. Books--like relationships--are experienced over time; movies are limited, limiting.
Movies move like a rushing river, which has both awe-inspiring power and constant fluidity. They are fun but you can never really get beneath the surface--unless you are sucked under and spit out before you realize what happened. Books are a lazy stream, inviting to the swimmer--more like visual art or a symphony. To jump in the water and float is infinitely more pleasurable and conducive to the imagination than being swept away. I enjoy both rapids and lazy rivers, but they feed very different needs. Rapids can be exhilarating, a challenge to raft or intimidating to walk along. Lazy water allows my mind to wander, to experience the entirety of nature and then move beyond to imagine what might lie just beneath, beyond, or under what I see, breathe, touch and smell.
The book is always better, but--here's the unexpected twist--you don't need a book to read. I'm not talking about newspapers, the internet or magazines; Reader's Digest (does it still exist?) or blogs. I'm talking about reading nature, experiencing relationship as the ongoing experience of reading everything life has to offer. Recently, a lady at my mom's book club, upon learning that Kate and I were heading out camping, offered several reading suggestions--particularly for Kate--to pass the time. We nodded and smiled, then left and looked at each other, shaking our heads. We can read every leaf or tree, drop of water in a lake or fish beneath its surface. I can read everything before my eyes and beyond. The book is always better than the movie, not because it is confined to the pages but because it is bigger than we could ever have imagined. So, we're heading camping and we'll be reading all the while. Kate might crack open Bryson's A Walk in the Woods (my suggestion), but I plan on reading the water and hopefully finding a walleye at the end of the line.
It might not make for an explosive ending, but all in all it will still be quite good.
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