It’s a good feeling, all this hustling around. It makes me feel, well, alive, even if I’m about to keel over from drowsiness. That’s one of my travel quirks: I like leaving early in the morning, the earlier the better. My official excuse is that I get to avoid the infernal midday snarl on the highway to the airport, but the real reason is that it gives me a full day on the other side, wherever that happens to be. I love having breakfast in another place – even if it’s the same old breakfast of chewy tapa and greasy eggs. Make no mistake: I love having breakfast at home, because I can be sure what I’ll be having, and I know what the coffee is going to taste like. But there’s something about strange scenery that whets the appetite and sharpens the senses.
But I’m not feeling very sharp right now, to tell you the truth. I whipped out my laptop and started pecking away at this piece, for fear that if I didn’t, I’d slide away to Slumberland and wake up a couple of hours later, still in Manila, but without my laptop. I make a quick survey of the people around my seat and decide that none of them look very much like a laptop thief – although I’ve never met one. Now the guy across me takes his own laptop out of his bag – dueling laptops! – and I’m pleased because mine is a silver-gray Apple Macintosh PowerBook and his is a matte-black IBM Thinkpad. There’s a word for these encounters – "Manichean," I think it was – having to do with the titanic collision between Good and Evil.
I wonder what he’s typing – I certainly know what I am, you’re seeing it right before your eyes – but you never know with these PC-toting dudes, I’ll bet he’s looking at an Excel spreadsheet and counting all the bottle caps they sold in Bankerohan last year, while I’m, uhm, producing literature. Or maybe he’s just playing Bejeweled while trying to look corporate; you can’t get more corporate than IBM (I’m not, for the moment, registering the fact that IBM actually made laptops for Apple once). In any case, I’m suddenly alert, knowing that an idle bystander – preferably one with a striking resemblance to Uma Thurman – could always look over my shoulder, and then his, and compare the quality of our computational endeavors.
Durnit, there’s a niggling iota of data I need that I don’t have on the PowerBook – a scheduled appointment that I have on my Palm Tungsten T, but haven’t hot-synced to the laptop yet (translation: it’s in my pocket). So I fish out the Tungsten, and use its slippery stylus to point here and point there (instead of the incomprehensible Tungsten T – there’s no real tungsten here – they should’ve called the local Palm the T2, for turo-turo).
I don’t know if The Other Fellow saw me and my Tungsten, but now he reaches into his own pocket for a – hmm, but naturally, a Compaq Ipaq. I swear, this guy has "PocketPC" and "Microsoft" written all over him. He fumbles around with the Ipaq’s controls, and I make a show of making everything look as easy as pie (you there, Uma?), skipping through my daily, weekly, and monthly appointments until I find the item I want: "Attend Macworld Expo in San Francisco, January 11-14, 2005." It’s only a dream, but heck, who knows? Apple might go out of its mind – or I should say come to its senses – and send a free ticket to its truest believer this side of the Pacific. I’ll bet The Other Fellow is looking over an entry like "Bring home durian 5 kilos."
I decide to up the ante further and whip out my cell phone, a slinky, mean, black-and-brushed aluminum Sony Ericsson T610. Among Mac geeks, the T610 is the sub-weapon of choice, mated to the Mac by whiz-bang software programs that allow me to use the phone as a remote control for Powerpoint and making coffee (well, once they make a Bluetooth coffee machine). The only problem is, I can’t think of anyone to call at 4:25 a.m., so I pretend to be going over my phonebook, which contains the collected numbers of powerful politicians and movie people – never mind that they never call me. Before I can erase a few stale messages, I see movement in a corner of my eye – he can’t resist, he’s taking out his phone as well, maybe because it’s ringing. I don’t even have to look to know what it’s going to be – a Nokia 7650, something I would’ve killed for two years ago but which now looks as clunky as a flatiron. "Yes, Ma," The Other Fellow is saying, "I’m already at the airport. No, I won’t forget the durian. Yes, Ma, five kilos."
I should feel like a winner, but a little voice tells me that something’s missing from my life – something great and wonderful, something all-powerful, something that starts with a capital G – why, yes, of course, hallelujah! – the new dual-processor Apple PowerMac G5!
If this plane drops out of the sky today, you know where I’m going – some place where it doesn’t matter if you check in early or late, and where The Other Fellow wields an oversized fork – the analog, non-digital model, but I just know it’ll hurt like hell.
We ride out to the boonies like armed and dangerous desperadoes, with triband, MMS-capable cellular phones in one pocket and Bluetooth-enabled PDAs (personal digital assistants or Palm Pilots to you) in the other, prepared for any test or trial of connectivity. (Don’t forget the five-megapixel digital camera in the seat pocket, and the iPod MP3 player in the holster.)
That’s it, connectivity, that’s what it’s all about, whether it means being able to give the president (whichever president, or wannabe president) a piece of your mind from 5,000 miles away, or having 50,000 friends on Friendster, or finding the complete lyrics of the Macarena song on Google in 10 seconds, and downloading the song itself on Kazaa or Limewire in a few minutes.
If my father (who, to his dying day, used a chewed-up Bic ballpoint to fill out crossword puzzles in the newspaper) were still alive, he’d probably invent an appropriately dismissive word to describe us – something like digiots.
Writing books is a difficult art. I think I should know, having written 10 of them. But reading books is another art altogether, and one that can be practiced by any literate person, of whatever age. I would not have been a writer if, at first, I did not read, and love to read. My first writing attempts, like those of other writers, were shameless imitations of what I had been reading. But if you read well, and can do reasonably good imitations, then the chances are you will learn to write well. This is why, until this day, when people ask me what they best way is for them to write well, I say "Read well." (Today, that’s easier said than done for someone like me. I think I read more than 50 percent of all the books I would ever read in my life before turning 16.)
Of course, many of us read not necessarily to be writers, but simply to partake of the pleasure and the wisdom offered by books. It’s a pleasure that uniquely engages the imagination, because you have to see with your mind’s eye. There is a deceptive simplicity in the challenge of reading books. It seems so easy, and yet it can lead to the most complicated outcomes, to whole afternoons and weekends lost to an escapade between two covers.
And it is not enough just to read much, but to read well. There are readers who plow through 1,000-page tomes and emerge with nothing, while others might read a 10-page pamphlet and emerge with a hundred pages of new ideas.
Writing well about reading well is perhaps the most difficult task of all, especially in an age where even the literature specialists and theorists have become almost incomprehensible in their language. The so-called text has taken over the book.
Thankfully, today, we are celebrating only the best books and their best readers. These books are finally only as good as your readings of them, and I share in the pleasure of your discoveries, and in the quality of your insights. (The only proposal I would like to make to the sponsors is to consider giving special awards to reviews of books by Filipino authors, and of books for young people, as a means of promoting these areas. The winners should qualify like the rest for the major prizes.)
Reading your essays not only made me want to read the books themselves; they also made me want to read more of what you yourselves could write on your own account. Perhaps, at some point, it will not be unthinkable for your own books to be the subject of these reviews.
Again, my congratulations to the winners, and my thanks to the sponsors of this project, especially the Philippine STAR and National Book Store, and I look forward to next year’s batch.