Notes from the end of an era

When I think how little anyone worried about the death of books, the death of bookstores, the death of so much else of the commerce of culture—music, movies, newspapers, the live singing and playing of music—I am moved to nostalgia even for that very ignorance. How could we have known that in a short time, in so very short a time, the markers among which we arranged our adult lives, the markers we were just coming to grasp, would be gone. And not in any slow disintegration and seeping loss of market share, but in a fantastic great implosion of beloved institutions. How could have known we were the last of a great tradition that would die tomorrow?

It takes an effort now, as Bill Bryson would say, even to remember the relation we had with words, with writers, before the Internet made it possible for anyone with an internet connection to be seen by the world. One so much enjoyed curling up with a newspaper on the train, or a book on the airplane. One correlated one’s travel with the speed of reading, to see if a good paper could last the whole train ride, or vice versa. One enjoyed knowing the great author was out there, somewhere, at his rustic house in Vermont, and might be reached by  correspondance through his publisher, and might actually respond. One aspired to be that distant presence, in all its vagueness and mystery. It was a smaller world but a more enchanting one. Typing, reading by lamplight, by candlelight, writing in cursive, penmanship, the connoisseurship of inks and pens, all now gone the way of the dial telephone, and with them a way of understanding and interpreting the world, and more than that a way of expression.

And this from a man who would never have claimed to be happy in those years. In fact he has never been happier than now, in these later times, these post-internet times. He will not therefore credit this great magic of the age with his improvement. And yet he will also not claim it kept him down. He will only say—I will only say  (this third person gets tedious)--that to the extent I could be helped by the rapid retrieval of information, the Internet has helped me. It has made my mind commensurate with the greatest in the land, as far as plain information is concerned. It has given me instant answers to difficult questions, of which I have many. And if those answers fail to satisfy my curiousity, I am consoled at least in knowing they are the best available. It has made me less worried about the strange questions I wish to ask. For even before I finish typing the question in the search space, my exact question appears at my cursor in anticipation.