Work Text:
Harold had always been one for books, something that Nathan had enjoyed teasing him about. The physicalities of them were attractive in and of themselves were attractive: the thick swik of turning pages, the creamy glow of the paper on a sunny afternoon, the stark punching of finite yet infinite lettering that made up words and sentences and images and lives, carved delicately yet indelibly into the airy softness of each page. The smell of them came in at a close second.
(Harold had always found the line between physical and not to be rather blurry when it came to books.)
Nathan had always found it ceaselessly entertaining that Harold seemed to so love books. A computer coding genius, creator of the Machine so used to dealing (and finding wonder) in the non-physical commands that a well-placed line of code could induce, in love with books. When he saw fit to point out the discrepancy, Harold would merely give Nathan a half-smile, pat whatever volume he’d stashed in his coat pocket, and remark that at least his books didn’t skimp on the details like Nathan’s movies liked to.
Harold never even tried to expound upon how the written word offered up an infinisphere of possibilities themselves, that imagination did not belong to one subject of study and that no man need be confined to only one, either. Literature has a power many fail to see: it raises questions, sometimes attempts to answer them, but ultimately, ultimately...it inspires one to think, to truly ponder things. Many, many Things.
War.
Peace.
Life.
Death.
The complexity of existence.
The simplicity of nothing.
The merit of leaving one’s mark on this world even if that mark wounds, versus choosing to walk softly without a large stick in a striving, Heruclean effort to observe and live and be without causing pain and anger and regret.
How living is not truly living if it is not fully done.
Harold had heard many other bibliophiles expound upon their reasons over the years: I like books because they bring stories to life in my mind, because they offer so much more than they initially appear to, because they comment on society and culture and philosophy and thought itself, because I like the way they smell. Harold himself had on many occasions been guilty of spewing somesuch nonsense to fellow book-lovers and librarians--never to friends, and certainly never to Nathan. Omission, after all, was not outright lying.
Because to speak his full mind would be to speak too much.
Among all the subjects taught in school, literature is one that often draws the most negative attention when it comes time to spend less money on the teachings that make learning worthwhile. Rather than acknowledge that all the math and science and art and reading and music and language that makes life life is equally important, the “non-essential” programs are cut from curriculae like a rotting limb, as if some parts of life and society are worth less than others.
But even that truth is saying too much in certain circles.
No. Harold likes books for many reasons, but it took him many, many years to discover the core reason, the one he has never before uttered and scarcely thought if only for the somber nature of the thing.
Books and stories and tales and epics, poetry and prose in all forms...they are examinations of self in the same ways mirrors are, but they do not truly reflect the reader; rather, they reflect themselves. In hidden not-words and non-existent implications, books examine futility. The futility of themselves, yes, as if their existing will change anything yet nothing at all, as if by being written and read or even burned and broken, they will cause some unknown Thing to happen. They perhaps secretly expound upon the futility of existence, but humans have yet to properly define what life is and Harold created and crippled a whole new kind of existence himself, so he rather doubts he is a good judge for the age-old argument of what life truly is or means or leads to.
Books in themselves are futile in the same way that everything is futile--because all things are fleeting, life especially, and because the universe is a closed system and net change is/will be/has always been zero. Rarely has Harold come across a book that even hints at the whisper of such things; afterall, authors so often try to bring around change with their writings, regarding the concept of change as a deity in and of itself in many ways. Whether or not their books affect that change is not so much an exercise in causation, but in correlation, and yet once again...it is objectively futile to bother to expound upon the subject itself, seeing at how the overall consensus is that the universe does not care because it cannot care because it will not care.
Perhaps he has simply been reading the wrong genres.
But futility does not mean uselessness, at least not how Harold sees and uses the term, which (as said before) is on a rare day indeed. And by it’s very nature, it does not imply inherent meaning in any one or various circumstance(s) or action(s) or thing(s). Futility is a freeing word, one that offers possibility rather than suppression, truth instead of idealism. It says that while we are fleeting and what we do is fleeting and perhaps even meaningless (though that’s an argument for another day), we do what we do because of meaning, in search of it. Even if it will never be found. Even if meaning is a construct and we are merely constructs in the way that the Machine is a construct, the act of constructing--like adding page after page of delicately carved, indelible words and sentences and images and lives to the spine of a book--is where the joy of the story is truly found, if one has a proper taste for it.
“Does that answer your question, Mr. Reese?”