––What is the source of your doubt?

Ebershoff: When this subject comes up – and it comes up a lot lately – we often lose sight of what we’re really talking about, and therefore what we actually fear losing. We confuse the book (an object) with reading (an experience). Stripped of meaning, the printed book is merely a technology—the codex. Around the time of Christ, the codex began to replace an earlier technology, the scroll. The Roman epigramist Martial was one of the first writers to make use of this new technology. For some two thousand years, the codex, and its 2.0 release, the printed book, have served writers and readers remarkably well.

Reading, by contrast, provides an experience that humans, as far as we can tell, have always craved. Reading entails imagining, learning, and seeing what we can’t see through language. If the impulse to imagine, to learn, to see the unseeable weren’t vital to being human, then Homer would never have written (sung?) The Iliad and The Odyssey, and whoever bothered to pass them down through the centuries would never have done so. These great epics began their lives, of course, as songs or spoken poems, living on the tongue for centuries before Homer––or whoever––transferred them to the scroll. But just because they weren’t books in the modern sense, doesn’t mean that those who first heard or read The Iliad and The Odyssey experienced them in ways that are fundamentally different from how we experience them today. I have to believe that when I open my Penguin deluxe edition of the magnificent Robert Fagles translation, I experience The Odyssey in a way that connects me with breathtaking directness to its original audience. Despite the changes in the mode of delivery – from the tongue to the scroll to the codex to the $16.00 paperback with French flaps and a rough front––the desire to find out what happens next in Odysseus’s long journey home remains constant and inextinguishable.

And so even if the codex goes the way of the scroll, reading won’t enter history’s graveyard. I don’t make this statement with a blithe disregard for what will be lost. Like many book people, I take great pleasure in a book that is physically beautiful and well-made. I appreciate the designers and craftspeople who, through their labors, make a book a book. I’m grateful there are so many people who have devoted their lives to designing, editing, publishing, and selling an actual book we can hold in our hands. (To say nothing of my awe for the writers who write them!) Like many others, I, too, would lament the disappearance of the thing we call a book. But even if the physical object were to disappear (which it won’t in my lifetime, or yours), the impulse to tell stories through language and the impulse to understand our world through language won’t expire. As long as that impulse survives, reading, or an enhanced variation of it, will also survive. Ultimately, this matters the most. The Odyssey hasn’t lasted all these years because of the papyrus Greek scholars copied it onto. Hasn’t The Odyssey earned the right to say, Relax, I’m not going anywhere. Maybe the scrolls are disintegrating in the museum, maybe even books have begun to look a little quaint, but Homer’s epics are astonishingly alive. I believe that as much as I believe anything.

Hay: It feels superfluous then, to imagine the dead floating about watching over lives when they no longer own life themselves. I have come to believe, after the deaths of other people I have loved, that the experience of mortality is transformative; that there is a more dramatic and deeper truth than the fantasy of life after death. Death transforms life–– the point is that there is an ultimate limit. If life were limitless the power to be altered by loss would not exist. And I know that it does because it has happened to me repeatedly.

MacKinnon: How to explain earthquakes and pain, famine and sociopaths, the constancy of corrupt leaders and stillbirths? At its most basic level, life demands blood. One must die so another can live. That’s how nations are born, sometimes children, that’s the way we eat. The world is littered with omnivores.

Menger-Anderson: I don't believe that people can truly protect themselves from disease by wiping down shopping carts or occasionally dousing themselves with sanitary hand fluids. The other day, I read that most US currency has traces of E.coli (some of which are undoubtedly harmful) in addition to cocaine (according to the cited study, U.S. currency has more cocaine on it than any other currency). My point is not that touching
money directly leads to death or disease or drug addiction, or that we clutch money for as long as we do the handles of shopping carts. My point is that everything is covered in bacteria and viruses, and that as we walk through a world full of germs, wiping down a cart or applying hand sanitizer before a meal but not after we pay for it feels like the first step toward a rigid life full of hand-sanitizer application, wipes, and paranoia.

Robinson: I doubt that it exists because, although I've dedicated so much time to its research, I have never been rewarded by any evidence. I've stared deep into those tropical sunsets, over and over, I've watched the great glowing orb of the sun slip over the edge of the earth, turn molten red, the whole thing, over and over. Not a touch of green. Well, why would there be?