A few weeks ago, I took a trip to celebrate my birthday at my sister’s new house in Maine with the family. At 5:30am on the morning of my birthday, the dim hallway light revealed her sneaking into my room to wake me up. The time had come. Half asleep I wrapped the bed sheets around me and diligently followed her. As we descended down the stairs I was greeted with a bouquet of bacon, sausage, waffles, fresh maple syrup and butter. Lots of butter. Not that fake butter smell, but that full fat farm fresh melting butter smell that brines your tongue with saliva. The fresh coffee resonated as it poured into porcelain mugs and the spoons scraped bacon onto a plate. This was a stairway to heaven.

As soon as I crossed the glowing threshold, I was squashed by the most delicious children in the world who hugged and kissed me with birthday wishes. They grabbed my hands and led me into the dining room where they instructed me to sit on my birthday throne. The youngest bestowed upon me the precious birthday crown, two cat bobble heads on either side of a silver headband that meowed when I moved. Before me was a table decorated to the nines with balloons, paper streamers, birthday party paper plates, napkins and party hats. This was one of the best birthday breakfasts I have had in my life.

As we were clearing the dishes, the lazy winter sun finally came up to join us. And by the time the girls were on their way to school, she was already creeping higher into the sky. This day was already off to a great start. By the time she had reached her highest point in the sky for a winter day, I was buried in the depths of the Freeport Book Shoppe.

When you walk into the store you are hit with the vanilla-ish scent of wood-based paper mixed with the organic smell of ink and adhesive degrading overtime. Piles of books decorate the overflowing aisles around small reading nooks and carpeted scraps of space.  I had found a cozy aisle close to the back of the store with a stool where I had built a barricade of books around me.  Like a newborn babe in my hands, I graced my fingers around the leather binding and thumbed through the pages of a first edition of Mark Twain’s Autobiography.

My olfactory indulgence had already taken me back to the library of books we used to have in our old house. The wood paneled walls and wood burning stove cozied up the literature when I dove into The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin as a girl. My heart was brimming with emotion as the smell of these pages had just transported me to one of my favorite places in the world. Here I was uninterrupted by the chaos of our modern world and free to explore at my own pace. I was safe.

And then, as I thought about sharing this moment with my gorgeous nieces, I was heartbroken.

The future generation is being deprived of this type of sensory perception. With the uprising of digital literature and the gaming industry, their childhood memories and linked to the blue glow of a screen, not scratching their fingers on the dog-eared pages as they tried to smooth them out on their next visit. Bookstores like Freeport Book Shoppe are becoming few and far between. Children no longer have the desire to run through the aisles to find the next installment of Peter Rabbit, because they can watch it on TV. The fine detail of the mischievous and graceful illustrations done by Beatrix Potter herself, can’t compete with a larger than life interpretation of an evocative moving picture. We are a society ruled by two senses, sight and sound.

When I went to first publish an article, I was highly encouraged to pick an image to go along with the article. They informed me that people respond to images before words and as a result I would get more “hits”. Well, I didn’t. People see text and are bored. Our children lose their attention span if you aren’t constantly throwing images in front of them. We don’t even teach our children to write in cursive anymore let alone promote reading books that aren’t digital. The majority of course work in middle and high school is now online. They don’t even need to pack books in their backpacks. Instead, you get a laptop, you get a laptop, and you get a laptop! I used to spend hours in the library in college researching. As a result of the muscle memory of going through the books, I retained knowledge in a way that I don’t think is possible when you do a google search. Being in a room, physically holding a book that someone else has held, reading the words off of a page, taking hand written notes in a notebook are all proven to be ways in which visual learners absorb knowledge. So why do visual learners feel the need to do without the physical participation?

We, as a society, don’t value language anymore. Life is becoming a series of shifting images from one to the next that evokes fleeting emotion. Instagram stories, Boom-a-rangs, Twitter. After two days of posting an image, it’s old news and you have to hurry up and post another in order to maintain your place in the hierarchy of digital judgment. You might as well put us on a spinning wheel in a hamster cage, because this leads nowhere. Long term satisfaction, true satisfaction, will soon cease to exist and the journey we have in this life will be erased, much like our digital media is after 48 hours.

LJE