The Browser's Ecstasy

In "The Browser's Ecstasy," O'Brien explores the experience of reading. He celebrates and laments the history of books, recognizing that "books die, disappear, are made to disappear: that certainty is the shadow side of reading."

A Conversation Between the Lines

As O'Brien looks at the history of reading books, the act of "browsing" becomes a conversation, an interweaving of written words across time and space. Each book affects the others, and he says, "It's almost as if the books read each other, the way characters in novels read novels."

Even more than a conversation between the lines and books, though, reading is "the attempt to keep alive a last irrational remnant of the old world, the lost world, the lost world of divination and magic signs." And if the text is lost, it may be lost forever--in that dark abyss of lost classics, a place to which we may only have access via cryptic references by famous writers in ancient texts. O'Brien writes, "The books themselves tell us of the death of books, of wars waged indiscriminately against people and against books. To destroy a single book is as good as erasing whole generations of transmitted thoughts."

Even if the texts aren't lost, the search for the connection between works, even between two quotations, can be a daunting task. O'Brien describes one particular "ancient doctor," who watched "the evidence fall into place"--only after a lifetime of searching for a connection between literary pieces.

A Future

The greatest future that a book can hope for is that it will be read, perhaps that it will be understood and connected to other works... and then in small hope that the creator of the work will be remembered in some part. But in existence, the book may change. O'Brien explains that the work changes, depending on the person who reads the work. He writes, "The future with which the book is alive stirs and turns. It moves around in the dark... Perhaps they change places depending on who is reading them, so no two people dip into the same book."

There seems to be something about the scribbling that must go on. The text is "a living thing, slippery and quivering," but O'Brien also says "It's a matter of blind luck that any book survives at all." And, he reminds us that the surviving works of literature stand as "haunting" reminders of "other words that were lost."