The Holiness of Books

I love books almost as much as my boyfriend loves movies. My personal collection is a fraction of what it would be, if both my free time and funds were, if not infinite, at least significantly amplified. There are a lot of attitudes about books that differ from mine, not in the sense that some people don't care for books and think that anyone who enjoys reading for leisure is stupid, but in the sense that books themselves are, somehow, sacred. Sacrosanct.

I've known people who feel it's disrespectful to dog-ear a book, or to let its spine crack. I may be in the minority, but I feel that that attitude just misses something. Then again, I have books that I've owned since I was in middle school (one very special one that I've had as long as I can remember). I couldn't even begin to guess how many times I've re-read them; this is where that limited funds thing comes in to play, to some extent, but I'd still re-read these books, because I love them. They are dog-eared all to hell, and a little battered, and some of them even have pen marks in the margins. But I'm confident that if someone were to browse through my collection of paperbacks, they'd have little trouble guessing which books were among my best beloved. I don't treat my books like precious treasures, even though some of them are, to me.

When it comes to books, there are different ways to show reverence and respect, I guess. I love books, I love that they are wonderful sources of information and inspiration and flights of fancy and speculation. I feel that even the most notorious hate-filled books are something special, if only because they teach us the language of hate - the more we can recognize it, the more capable we are of forestalling hateful actions (that is, of course, the hope). I don't feel, however (and this is my atheism bleeding through), that there is any book so holy and precious that it cannot stand to be damaged, or even destroyed.

Yeah, I know. That's a fucking shocking thing to admit.

My qualifier is that I would hate for every copy of a book to be destroyed. Because, as I said before, they all have something to give to us, if only for the example of what not to say, how not to do it.

I guess I don't really know where I'm going with this. I've just been reading two of my most favorite books in the last few weeks (The Sorceress and the Cygnet, and The Cygnet and the Firebird by Patricia A. McKillip), and it's been on my mind.

The Secret the Science Fiction World DOESN'T WANT YOU TO KNOW!

I have very recently made a discovery that changed my life, and I'm going to share it all with you now, so that I can change your lives as well. Besides, if I tell fourteen people, those fourteen people will tell fourteen people, and then almost thirty people will know this earth-shattering secret. Are you ready? Here we go.

Human cloning is real. I have met Neil Gaiman's clone.

You're shocked. I know, I was too. It took me several days for this to sink in. When it first hit me, my brain tried to rationalize it in a lot of different ways. Mostly that this guy just looks a lot like Neil Gaiman. But that just isn't the case. He's a clone, and he was grown sometime in the early 80's. Which is the other thing that really rocked my world. Human cloning is real, and has been real for my entire life. I got kind of depressed when I realized this, having wanted a few clones of myself for many reasons ever since I found out what cloning was and what having a day job was.

There are still a lot of unanswered questions here, obviously. If Neil Gaiman has a clone, for instance, who else does? I can't even speculate. This is too huge. Why would Neil Gaiman clone himself, and then keep that clone in southern Minnesota?

I know that there are going to be a lot of skeptics out there. Probably at least 20. And that's okay. I want each and every one of you to know that I'm going to do my best to verify this report, up to and  including a proper DNA test. But that's going to take a while, because Neil Gaiman is a very busy man, and he's not just going to come to my house to give me a cheek swab when I call him about the matter. That'll probably take a few weeks. And also, obviously, pics or it didn't happen. I'm going to get a photo of them together when I get the DNA samples. Because otherwise some jerk could come in and say, "That's not a clone of Neil Gaiman. That's just a hack Photoshop job of an old pic of Neil Gaiman 'shopped into a gas station. Loser." And that will make me cry, because I don't even have Photoshop.

But those are all incidental. I know the real argument against Neil Gaiman having a clone is the fact that the first mammal cloning wasn't until 1996, which is a long time after the early 80's. But on that, I'm one step ahead of you.

 

In other news, I've been working a lot of overnights at work, in an effort to utterly miss out on all the crazy holiday shopping madness. I haven't had a full, decent night's sleep in almost a week. I'm not sure if it's because of the work, or because this is just too much of a revelation for one brain to stand. 

I'm guessing the latter. The truth is out there, people.