Mark was a precocious young boy, skinnier and more fragile than the others, paler too. While the other children frolicked in the sun during recess, Mark always retreated into the dimly lit library, and beyond it into the world of books. However, there were days when he was forced to play with the other children.
Thus, he always emerged with emboldened conviction that he much preferred his imaginary friends and creatures contained within the library. Books were much friendlier than real humans. When they became unfriendly, you could simply close the book, skip ahead, and imagine an alternate ending.
With time, Mark’s mind became an oasis of these beings as they intermingled, took on new forms, and engaged in all sorts of activities beyond those that had existed within the pages he had read. CS Lewis’s personified critters and satyrs, the worlds of Madeleine L’Engle, R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps, especially Slappy, and K.A. Applegate’s Animorphs all productively comingled within him.
Then, in the first grade, Mark was finally invited to create his first book. It was a nonfiction book about penguins and his drawing skills were approximately average for a six-year-old. Yet, he hungered for more, and a month later the time finally came to create a fiction book.
He believed that it was stunning, and he titled it My World.
Mark Twine wore a tweed suit every day. [drawing of Mark in said suit]
A twine string existed between him, his world, and theirs. [Mark with books, string, other boys]
His world is full of books, the creatures of books, his friends. [Mark with friends]
The twine string is like a tightrope. [Mark watches as others attempt to reach out and fall]
Mark’s friends always made sure that no one crossed. [Mark watches as friends push humans away]
Mark is much happier this way. [Mark and friends are smiling]
The teachers were indeed stunned. However, surprisingly, he received a poor grade and was told to be more like Freddy.
Here is Freddy’s example of what the teachers were looking for, an example that seemed suspect to young Mark, acquainted as he was with what little he had already read.
My mother likes to make sandwiches. [A mother smiling]
I like bologna. [Slice of cold cut meat]
Cheese is good. [Self-portrait smiling with cheese]
Yum! Yum! Yum! [Self-portrait eating sandwich]
Page four, the one about cheese, was accompanied with a comment from the teacher that his combination of cheese and cheese, the smile, was quite bright. Mark did have to concede that point. However, that minor detail aside, he was offended, extremely offended that the teacher somehow felt that this was superior to his own work.
When he returned home, he asked his mother about it and she said, “it’s just a book, Mark, figure out why she liked Freddy’s better and move on. You have to accept the present and change the future! You know you should be focusing on math. It’s where all the people will work one day, with numbers! Books are for entertainment. I’m sure that yours was splendid!” She never read it though.
Meanwhile, later that evening, Mark had a meeting with his friends. His generic satyr, Mr. Thomas, decided to speak for everybody, “the cheese part was actually very good. We must acquire that strategy, but the rest was bologna!” Thus, they all laughed, and Mark decided that he would read more books to prepare for the next opportunity to create one of his own for a willing spectator. He also decided that the teacher had merely failed to cross the bridge, the tightrope to truly understanding him and his ragtag group of friends. Their brotherhood grew with each book as did Mark’s knowledge of the world, from boxcar children to outsiders, what it’s like to be blind to what it’s like to be popular.
“Someday”, Mark silently proclaimed, “I will become the greatest creator of books ever. Someday, I will be able to share this world with others, mind to pen to paper to mind. Someday, I will be the one that a little boy like me reads to discover such wonderful friends beyond the playground.”
Anyhow, Mark grew up. The world was harsh to his childhood dreams, yet they lived within him still. He was now twenty-five years old, had earned a college degree in Economics, worked as an accountant, and continued to write without publishing. Write, write, write as he might, nothing had yet emerged from him that he had felt was truly worthy of publishing. That was soon about to change though.
Forged in the fire of competitive challenges amongst friends in college, his writing skills had improved, yet he struggled to create a work that truly escaped the gravity of the literature that he had read throughout his life. He felt as if it was all derivative, building upon and disseminating the ideas of others, like a bird shitting the seeds of that which it has eaten. Perhaps critiquing them, but even the critiques felt rehashed, as if they added nothing new to the conversation. He had yet, you see, to truly create.
He had several novels under development, collections of short stories, poems, music, documentary, bits and pieces here and there, but none of it had truly come together, not yet, not in a way that was worthy of his first publication. There had been so much rejection, so much resilience! Thus, he rose within competitions below the radar of the readers, his name still unknown to the world. However, he knew that one day the moment would strike, the sudden recognition that he had truly created a masterpiece. In the meantime, he built upon his visions, tore them apart, rebuilt them, and overcame periods of self-doubt. There were, however, periods when it became more difficult to believe that he might truly achieve literary and artistic greatness. It was all that he had though, that little hope, that strange desire, a hubris that had been his lifelong companion.
He had friends, mind you, but they were like him. Several of them had already published, and others were similarly plugging along on their life works. They were clinging to their dreams, and fighting for them too. However, in most cases, reality was sinking in. They had begun to recognize the absurdity of ever truly living as an author. Mark was the most optimistic of them, perhaps inhumanly so. He gave the others the energy that they needed to continue believing and silenced them when they introduced doubt into their conversations over drinks, going so far as to excommunicate, having secured the cooperation of the others, a member of the group who induced too much doubt about their future literary greatness.
This particular evening, however, was to be quite special. You see, they had found a new fascination and had gathered together in their favorite dive bar to indulge. The announcement was about to be broadcast worldwide. There he stood, on a balcony overlooking his estate, the much-maligned leader of a strange fringe group of conservation activists known as the Earther Movement. They had grown popular on social media and even achieved airtime on national news due to the absurdity of their agenda and methods. Most people assumed that it was a strange form of performance art, performance art that had been taken to the extreme and yet appeared to be harmless. Thus, Mark had begun to follow their movements, to gawk about them during drinks with friends, and he eagerly awaited their leader’s latest call to the world to bring down the edifice of the paper-based publishing industry. Additionally, he and his friends had a challenge this evening: to watch the entire broadcast without laughing. Thus, it began.
“Everything you see around you, the lush verdant trees purifying the air, the life sustaining gardens from which our daily supper is harvested and our flowers bloom, and the paths that connect us to the world beyond, our fellow human brethren and the other creatures of Earth, it has all been birthed from books. My bucolic estate has sprung from books as we all will and yet you see none. There is a future beyond books. It looks like this. It is beautiful, natural, and we will build it together. I stand now upon a firm foundation of what was once an environmentally devastated tract of land. We gathered books. We created a landfill of books and, fed from these pages, the Earth was reborn, became fecund, and thanks us with bountiful harvests of beauty and sustenance.
Pages, pages like so many delicate leaves from a tree, why did we ever see the need to print, to rip flesh from the Earth for such trifles? Our species once told oral histories. Our species has evolved to produce television, electronic books, myriad forms of knowledge transmission. We can exist without books. We must! We must shed our archaic scales to become at one with nature! Do her violence no more! This is one of many steps, but the time has come. The time has come for humanity to give back what she has stolen, to return the books to the Earth, and to build a more sustainable future in harmony with our great mother. I say unto you, dear readers, the age of books is at a close, and yet, a new chapter is beginning!”
Thus, ended the transmission, and Mark laughed out loud.
Yet those who were fervent supporters of the growing Earther Movement rejoiced; the next phase of Earth’s rebirth had been announced and if they had books, which most of them did not, they followed like lemmings to place them within their compost bins. There the book would sit, slowly becoming and returning to the Earth as mulch and soil, mulch and soil infused with the knowledge that humanity had infused into their pages. Perhaps, some thought, the knowledge will return to us as we eat the harvest of the Earth—leafy greens with formulae, turnips the history of ancient Greece, a sweet potato with the knowledge of master craftsmen, and a blood orange containing the seed of a new sustainable social order.
No one actually thought that, but one lover of books, Stacie Maldon, sat alone in her apartment and imagined them imagining such absurdities. She could see them outside her window congregating in the garden below to contribute to her community’s compost project. Her eyes grew heavy and wet, and yet not a tear was shed. Yes, Stacie Maldon spent the night alone, lamenting, crying without crying. You see, all of her friends were books.
Almost all of them, that is. Early in the night, immediately following the broadcast, Stacie sent a message, “Mark my words Mark, this is fucking real!” He did not respond right away though and Stacie was left to look down upon her neighbors’ revelry; more were coming, books in hand, and an anxiety began growing deep within her, nesting, making a home, its young hatching and preparing to take flight.
Thus, late in the evening, she elaborated upon her initial message, she called Mark, but discovered that his phone was dead. The only option was to leave a voice message, “Mark, are you seeing this? [exasperated pause accentuated with sigh of disbelief] How can I continue to invest time, money, and emotional energy into becoming a writer with this type of shit happening out in the world? I’m going to finally finish a manuscript and then the whole industry will be destroyed by these fucking maniacs. They’re won’t be any books anymore. They’re going to come for our fucking bookshelves. They’re going to come for our fucking bookshelves. [click]”
***
The author deemed this one absolutely hilarious, but too derivative to continue writing. We met Ray Bradbury once. Did you know Fahrenheit 451 was first published in Playboy Magazine?
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