The City of Dreaming Books

I found it in one of the packed boxes on my parents attic. Neatly arranged between my childhood copy of Der Struwwelpeter (or Shockheaded Peter as it should be known in English) and tons of old music cassettes. Ancient relicts my future children will probably never know how to work. A pencil and a music cassette, they'll never get the link. Kids today don't. Amusing yet sad at the same time. Maybe they just don't care, being too consumed on getting the newest technology the instant it is realeased, to worry about the practical cornerstones that made our recent technology possible after all.

Anyhow. My diary. Probably the ugliest one a kid could have. A dreary grey cardbox cover, nothing fancy at all. I loved it though. As long as I can remember I always wanted to write, to keep a diary of my life, to treasure the special moments and keep them forever. To have a physical proof of my adventures, hopes and dreams. To be able to open it up years later and relive the days again and again, chuckling about the apparently important problems one once had as a teenager. Knowing now you'd probably not change a thing, as those memories contributed to who you are today.
But it seems you just don't do that anymore. Not the way you should. Have you ever wondered about the last time you actually wrote something longer than your weekly grocery list by hand?
A gazillion emails and text messages are being sent all around the globe every hour, carelessly written down in a hurry, making sure to hit some imaginative deadlines. We all do it on a daily basis, and this blog proves that I too have surrendered to the convenience of rather typing my thoughts into a machine instead of lovingly and carefully drawing them on the maiden pages of a personal dairy. Why I cannot say. My appointments are written down in my iPad calender. My contacts are on my cell phone. I used to know about 30+ numbers by heart as a teenager. Do you still do?

The worst things are eBooks. Digital rats. Probably the most unacceptable invention of the 21st century. Okay, I am exaggerating right now... but still. You get my point. Call me old fashioned or a bore or whatever, i don't give a f***.  As convenient as it may be to carry a thousand books around on the electronic device of your choice, it just doesn't feel right to me. How can you cherish reading a novel / poem etc. without completely indulging into the written words, without feeling the paper on your skin, without actually turning pages? Haptic is an important part of my personal reading experience, one of the many reasons why I prefer novels printed in the UK and the US above the German edition. The vast majority of German publishing houses simply suck at creating beautiful, artistically designed covers.
Staring at your computer screen is what most of us do all day long anyway, so why bother to keep on reading books on a different screen in the evening?
Isn't there a unique, maginificent beauty in an old library full of books? Entire walls filled with words of wisdom that form the most incredible stories you could ever imagine. I think this circumstance alone justifies them an actual instead of a digital storage space.
And then there is the distinct familiar smell in old libraries. The knowledge that people long gone before we were even born or thought of, read those very books and enjoyed the same words we do today.
Books have been passed down from one generation to another, valuable memories, signed by those they belonged to. Proof of what used to be. Who will pass down their eBooks? Before the turn of this decade all your Kindle devices and iPads will be outdated and your books nothing more than one among a thousand other files on your computer. I am scared of the day bookshelves will contain nothing but an electronic device. As much as I don't wanna sound like a professional pessimist right now there has been a general decline in print products all over the world no one can deny. I just hope humanity gets not too consumed in technology to abandon the one medium that once revolutionized the world. Chapeau, Gutenberg!

There is an empty notebook in the drawer of my desk. Once bought to be filled with words. Written in ink. Gotta keep on searching for that old fountain pen of mine. Making sure to breathe some fresh life into the pages. Maybe not today, or tomorrow or the day after that. But in a not too distant future. To ensure I will be able to keep skipping through pages filled with memories in a few years, I can then chuckle at again.

Family Ties

Holidays. It is this time of the year. Spring. Families reuniting. Getting together. Sharing meals, laughter and memories. Taking pictures, once polaroids, today an uncountable number of digital memories that will once be looked at and then carefully stored onto your hard drive, a memory made up of an endless cascade of 0s and 1s, aligning perfectly to form the faces of you and your loved ones.

I am guilty myself. Guilty of confusing the simple joy to value the intimate and natural situations we once felt while taking our pictures with the urge to take a perfect photograph. To rather create a piece of photographic art than an everlasting memory. That old Polaroid camera I bought off Ebay in December is sitting on the shelf next to my desk, reminding me that as much as every monent you encounter is worth being remembered, the carefully chosen ones are the only ones you need and regularly come back to. A sparkling cascade of glimpses, your individual Best Of My Life.

We didn't take any pictures this year. Easter has never been a big deal in my family. But even if it would have been, things probably would not be that different these days. Family meetings are rare and never consist of more than five or six of us. Age differences have always been ubiquitous in our family. I have been thinking a lot about my grandma lately. It would have been her birthday on May 10. She would have turned 113. Right, 113 years, a number I can't relate to at all. How could I at the tender age of 31? Last week I read the latest issue of the history magazine I have subscribed to. It deals with the year 1914 and what an immense impact it had on how the entire century turned out to be. While staring at the incredible photographs of 1914 displayed in there I realized that my grandma was just an ordinary teenager back then. Probably hoping to fall in love for the first time, to finally outgrow infancy and turn into a young woman. Full of hopes, wishes and dreams that were crashed once WWI started. A hundred years ago, a century, an eternity for me. But after all just a glimpse in the eye of the universe.

My uncle was born in 1930. My mom followed in 1944, right during WWII. My cousin Christine was born in 1964, her brother in 1967. And then there's me, the only child. I did never mind being an only child or having parents that had me way later than in their 20s. Quite the contrary, as they always acted pretty laid back. Trusting me. Giving me the freedom to make my own choices, confident I would not disappoint them. I don't think I ever really did, despite being a pretty wild and sultry teenager back then. But as we all grow older and I see my friends attending one family get together after the other, I feel betrayed. Betrayed to miss out on having a really close relationship with my cousins. To miss out on having grandparents. Or to even consciously get to know them. I hardly had the chance.

There is this one single photograph of my grandma and me. Taken 30 years ago. It may have been around Easter. Before she got sick. One of the special pictures. The ones you keep close to your heart. The ones that should have been a polaroid picture, neatly tucked away in your wallet. Reminding you of times long gone by. Captured forever. Reminding you that this time next year, we won't all be here.