“It has always almost been the case that the gift which has spoken so commandingly to my soul has been a printed book.” I take this simple but passionate line from Robert Macfarlane, a British travel writer, to represent my own feelings and that of so many others who, in our pervasive digital age, remain in love with the printed book. I also like his qualifying ‘always’ with ‘almost’ in his sentence, because all books do not incite the same interest or impact the reader equally. We all have our preferences between fields and disciplines, topics and themes. Even within a certain subject, the varying forms and genres have a different effect on different people — some would pick up short fiction instead of novels and some would like blank verse more than ghazal.

While Macfarlane focuses more on landscapes and nature in his travel writing, I find myself more interested in accounts of people and their culture where landscape and architecture are mentioned, but serve as a backdrop. Something wider and more expansive, such as another British travel writer and storyteller Bruce Chatwin’s Anatomy of Restlessness, will attract my attention more. But what has drawn me closer to Macfarlane is an essay written by him some time ago in memory of his friend Don.

This essay, titled ‘The Gifts of Reading,’ is about a close relationship built on a shared passion for books. Macfarlane and Don met in China as teachers of English language and literature, one of them British and the other American. However, their relationship was cemented not just by reading and discussing books among themselves, but by gifting books, some that they would buy and some that they had treasured in their own collections. In a way, Don helped Macfarlane set his tone of writing by gifting him notable travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor’s celebrated work A Time of Gifts.

Macfarlane also discusses the ideas of Lewis Hyde who contrasts commodity with gift. Hyde maintains that a commodity is property that is acquired, kept and sold for one’s owns profit. But a gift is a kind of property that profits the other. Placing his exchange of gifts with Don within the framework Hyde provides, Macfarlane writes that this exchange was not limited to the times when they met personally. They would send books to each other across the oceans through the post. Once, on a visit to the United Kingdom from the United States, Don left three books wrapped as gifts in three different rooms of Macfarlane’s house before leaving at a time when his friend was asleep. After Don died of cancer, his daughter wrote an email to Macfarlane. “Reading kept him alive,” she said, “right till the end.”

It is unfortunate that many of our poets and writers read less — if not in quantity then certainly in variety.

Except for writers who see the two as inseparable from each other, reading and writing are different acts for most people. It is taken for granted that writers will be voracious readers. However, in Pakistan it is unfortunate that many of our poets and writers read less — if not in quantity then certainly in terms of variety — than their counterparts would do in other societies. Therefore, for a serious writer in any genre, avid and insightful readers are sometimes more useful to consult than fellow writers. When writers gift books to other writers, they harbour an inherent wish that the recipient of the gift will write about or mention their work. When readers gift books, it is pure generosity.

Gifting important books and special issues of literary journals was a part of our tradition as well. In Pakistan, it is about time we started gifting books again on all possible occasions. Before I end, I have to mention my friend Divya Singh Kohli who would send me books from India and other places she visited for so many years. It is such a wonderful experience to receive a parcel of books by post, particularly when you do not know what is inside.

The writer is a poet and essayist based in Islamabad

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 6th, 2017