The bookworm

 

As a bibliophile (defined as someone who reads to perceived excess) who devours books metaphorically, I have a feeling of kinship with my fellow bookworms who stay among the pages in books. In a world ever prone to smother lyricism, through quick entanglements, in favor of more squalor and harshness, a metaphorical bookworm musing over a real one presents a tiny piece of amusement. In a world obsessed with big fights for bigger stakes, the small carries an added significance.

So dear readers, let’s drop our ideological squiggles, critical and prescriptive outlook and egocentrical detailing to enjoy the restive promenades of tiny bookworms in the tantalizing obscurity of closed books in bookshelves. Pause in your proclivity to throw desperate die—as an escape from the reality by effort at coping with some false sense of inadequacy—to salvage some formulaic salability in this world of products, products and more products. Forget about work, worry and weariness and feel the definitive rhythm of a bookworm hiding among the pages of an old book while a restful reader carries on with his reading.

Mind you, when talking of book-dwelling insects, sometimes people generalize it too much and include larvae of beetles, moths, cockroaches and termites as bookworms as well. But they aren’t so in any sense of the term. They are outright destroyers, the criminal book-destroyers. They damage their own house out of sheer greed; just like we humans do with mother earth by using our comparatively bigger brains to hone sinister craftsmanship to exploit the littlest bit mother earth has to offer. Termites start eating the wooden shelf and later end up chucking-up the books as well.

The real, and most common, bookworms are the silverfish or booklice. They are ravishingly scrupulous in comparison to the book-destroyers. The personalized advocacy of the ‘will to live’ as a species doesn’t force them to craft and re-craft indignities to present them as natural survival instinct and thus take more than what is needed.

Maggots thrive in the muck. The bookworms, on the other hand, are the intellectual worms. They stay in the sea of words, the golden cocoon of knowledge and wisdom, eating sugar, starch, molds and glue.

It was feistier for them in the old times. The books had leather and cloth binding using glue having organic matter (maida or bleached wheat flour). Microscopic mold and fungi prospered in dank, dark libraries, archives and museums gorging on cellulose (plant fiber available in paper) and other polysaccharides like starches and dextrin. The bookworms had full privacy in dim, humid environment.

At their worst, they consume just the portions of books containing polysaccharides, leaving the paper slightly ragged at the edges, which seems even faintly artistic to a laidback and affectionate reader like me. Despite their full riot of life, the old tomes still remain readable. They take just as much as they need, which is very little in amount and hence still leaves the book readable. They aren’t voracious eaters either. A silverfish can survive without food for more than a year. Little fasting critters they are. Silvery sages with their attendant aura of a vague strain that develops when one’s self becomes free of impulsive forebodings rummaging through the psychosomatic system. 

The bookworms are silvery shining, segmented soft bodied insects, less than 1 mm in length, having six tiny lobster legs on the front part, two antennas on the front and three hind antennas jutting out from their silvery butt. The book dweller is a sophisticated little insect with two compound eyes. A note of caution. They are very agile fish in the sea of words. So one has to be exceedingly engrossed to see their anatomy in the fleeting seconds you have when you suddenly open the book and the little privacy-seeker creeps away.

A silverfish can live up to three years and is capable of regenerating its antenna within a few weeks if it loses one in case you snap shut a book, egged by some misspent mirth, too forcefully injuring the book dweller. On a crucial note, be gentle in opening and closing a book. It avoids maiming some silverfish. If you happen to maim a pair of lovemaking silverfishes, it’s heartbreakingly sad. Being caring and considerate in handling your book is culturally appropriate for the community of readers. Personally I find the sight of a silverfish in my book a juicy glimpse, a good omen to the start of a reading session.

They are even more ancient than the dinosaurs. In pre-historic times they survived by eating plant matter under the bark of trees. But there was a danger of being eaten by earwigs and spiders there. Inside the books, the risks are from restless readers and overcautious library keepers throwing pest control pills into the racks. 

They have complicated mating rituals. Love is all radiant, exotically unfolding and ruddy in its procreative folds from microscopic maters to the mammoth ones. The female silverfish produces many whitish oval eggs out of which white babies emerge to play among words penned by famous writers sleeping in the closed books with the timeless and mammoth ease of a mountain.

As a bibliophile, who gorges on open books, I have a feeling of familiarity and softness for the silverfishes who feast on a closed book. I don’t snap a book too forcefully to avoid injuring some lazy silverfish swimming in a sea of words. After all, it’s the little critter’s home. And I let out a plum exclamation when I see one.

Sometimes when I happen to see a silverfish scampering away to safety, as I open the grand spellbinder of a book, I just muse over the world of these small silvery beings. Little questions emerge. Does the nature of the silverfishes vary in accordance with the genre of the books they reside in? Are those who stay in poetry volumes softer than those tasting the paper in crime thrillers? Are there critters who share and feel Shelley’s moth-desire for the sun? Or the ones mirthing with spellbinding master satirists? Or the ones who feel affinity with speculative, craggily backboned desires dotted with human fallacies, creeks and coves? What about the marriage between two silverfishes from different types of books? What happens when a silverfish crosses over from a work of poetry to hardcore philosophy? Or from a science book to arts? I amuse myself by imagining a lively multi-ethnicity of books worms in my library.

I accept their presence in my books that my father bought decades ago. Generations of them, from young striplings to old crippling, staying in our old books.

Something staying, living, playing, procreating and dying among words and pages of a book acquires an august status in the eyes of this rural bibliophile.