My wife and I moved a short while back from our crowded and lair-like house outside Boston to an abruptly more open and airy place in Amherst. Over a month in, I’m still gaping at new space and different light. The move came after thirty years in the house that most of our lives had happened in, the house about which I said for close to thirty years to anyone who would listen, “You’re going to have to bury me out back by the hollowed-out apple tree trunk.” And I meant it.
A decade ago, wars of liberation were being fought all across North Africa and the Middle East. Smaller, more personal wars of liberation were being fought in France, too. Here in the fifth arrondissement of Paris, we battled the forces of French bureaucracy to liberate our household goods from their shipping containers at Le Havre. We had valued most of the fifty boxes at $50 each. Many contained books, writing supplies, and journals. Many contained art. How do you assign such things a dollar amount?
This is the age of Kindle, cloud storage, and the app-for-everything. We’ve said goodbye to personal libraries and printed books, to cabinets and accordion files, to calculators and accounting ledgers. But is our understanding of the world—and even our sense of self— diminished as we lose our paper trail? The Berkeley artist Ann Arnold recently joined me in considering the advantages of the analog life. Here are our a few of our observations about old-fashioned ways of storing and accessing information.
The test of a great essayist from Montaigne to Mark Twain, from Emerson to Virginia Woolf, is the ability to entertain a steady procession of ideas, some of them inflammatory, some entertaining, some downright contradictory, before deciding which will play a central role.
As Emerson notes, “The best part…of every mind is not that which (the writer) knows, but that which hovers in gleams, suggestions, tantalizing unpossessed before him. His firm recorded knowledge soon loses all interest for him, but this dancing chorus of thoughts and hopes is the quarry of his future, is his possibility.”
Listen up, suburbanites and city dwellers. You are not the only game in town. There’s a vast tract of land you never think about, that just might hold the key to the next stage of human evolution. While we tend to look to New York, Silicon Valley, or Washington, DC, rural areas also give rise to experimentation and innovation.
Story time with dad can enhance language skills and inspire children to explore a broader range of reading materials, says Nancy Flanagan Knapp, associate professor at the University of Georgia, “And perhaps most important, it sends a message to boys that reading isn’t just for girls.”