My bookworm has a battery

Here’s a conversation-starter that’s got so many miles on it they park it in the cliché section: “If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have one book, what book would you chose?”

Incidentally, I’ve never understood the “desert” angle on that. Would the answer be any different if the island was covered in jungle? Maybe I just don’t have a head for clichés.

But jungle or not, it’s something to consider on Saipan, where most people I’ve known, including voracious readers, have opted not to accumulate a large library. Saipan brings out the minimalist instincts. Tropical living probably does that in general, and the Commonwealth’s shaky economic ground certainly emphasizes the virtues of being fleet-footed, and, reciprocally, the pitfalls of being bogged down.

Nothing will bog you down like books will. That’s a fact no matter where you are. There’s intellectual capital behind the physical mass, and the interaction spins a strong field of inertia.

I recently helped a relative downsize from a house to a small apartment. He had thousands of books in the house, but for logistical reasons he had to limit himself to just one box of books for the move.

I didn’t envy the guy having to make the choice. This is a case where fast-thinking and slow-thinking are bound to have different results. Which is to say, you could mull this decision for five minutes, or for five days, or for five months, and you’d probably come up with a different answer every time.

While the one-book-on-a-desert-island gig never entertained me, I started wondering which items from my library would survive a brutal culling down to just one box.

I’ve since worked and reworked the list a few times and now I think it’s pretty solid. I don’t know why the exercise interests me, but, well, it does. It might interest you, too: For many Tribune readers, of all the things you’ve owned, books might be some of the most painful things to part with. So, give it a shot, and contemplate what you’d put in the box.

This whole thing opens the door to a broader matter, which is that being attached to anything can be a recipe for grief, since we can’t hold it without also holding the prospect of its eventual loss.

If that’s a philosophical bummer, there is a philosophical counterpoint. The sages of the East point out that after you use a boat to cross a river, it’s better to simply leave the boat on the shore as you continue your journey. By contrast, dragging the boat behind you will merely impede your progress. If nothing else, this outlook has inspired me to de-clutter my shelves by throwing out a lot of books that, having been read and absorbed, have little more to offer than the physical reassurance of their presence.

Of course, that whole boat analogy is really concerned with more than the realm of tangible possessions, but you can always count on me to reduce the profound to something mundane and material.

The elephant in the room is the electronics revolution. Storage media the size of your fingernail can hold thousands of books nowadays.

It seems that anything that can be digitized will be digitized. Consider the stuff that used to dwell on physical media that has migrated, or is migrating, to the digital realm: office documents, music, movies, newspapers, magazines, photos, maps, airline tickets, medical prescriptions, bills, bank statements, and so on.

Heck, even money is essentially electronic these days, moved at the push of a button between virtual accounts.

Books, of course, are well along in this process, as anyone seeing Kindle offerings at Amazon.com can attest. What will happen to books that don’t make the leap to a digital format? Maybe, like music that didn’t make the leap, they’ll just fade away. People won’t miss what they don’t see.

Still, overall, digitation is certainly a boon for Saipan residents, since it makes it easier to live lightly and to remain nimble. Younger generations will wonder why the oldsters (including me) insist on clinging to their fading chunks of paper and ink. So I guess the sun will eventually set on the one-book-on-a-desert-island thing, and it won’t even be worth the effort to explain why we used to talk about it.