This essay is an attempt--isn't that what all essays are?--to put into context some ideas that have come up in conversations I have had with friends on Facebook over the past few days about how many things I have, how many things there are, and why I now live with only one 'physical' (molecular?) book.
It is not a coincidence that the one meatware book I keep around is by McLuhan, who predicted, explained, understood far more than most, but lamented books' being replaced by other media as the primary shapers of our minds. Over the nearly 72 years of my life, I have owned thousands and thousands of books. One of my first possessions was an Encyclopedia: my father bought it for me soon after I was born. (He also bought me a swim suit at about the same time, but I outgrew it much sooner than the books.) I have owned Aubrey Johnson's books on Ritual and Kingship in the original hardback University of Wales editions. (The University of Wales Press had similar dust covers to those of Oxford, but replaced the green buckram of Oxford with a somewhat less robust grey.) I spent much more money than I had for the OUP publications of the Dead Sea Scrolls.I have had a collection of Psalters that took up a book case 8 feet by 8 feet, and some did not fit within i.I could go on for a very long time--Peter Beard's photography books and journals, The Sacred Books of the East in the OUP Bombay Edition, which smelled like sandlewood. But I also like to be able to wander. One day, sitting in an beautiful apartment in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, which included my little chapel, and a closet full of vestment, whose every wall was lined with book cases, I realized that I was confusing the container for the thing contained. I was paying rent on an apartment from which I would be gone many months at a time, in order to house my containers. Let me assure you that divesting of my collection was not easy. When I asked the local library if they would like some of my books, they of course said yes--until they saw how many there were. But I did find them new homes, and bought a Kindle. I still enjoy fondling books, and from time to time buy one that has a particularly nice hand.
More importantly has been my growing realization that books are not the only way ideas and knowledge can be shared, and they are not necessarily the best way, even though they have ruled of our lives and minds since Gutenberg made the printing press the master of all things. Indeed, printed books, which are what we usually mean when we say books, have been around only a few hundred years. Writing, especially as a medium for anything more erudite than shipping letters and invoices, only a few thousand. Socrates expected writing to be a curse on human knowledge. Consider especially the Phaedrus.) A. R. Johnson (from the beautiful grey books above) theorized that the Psalms were written descriptions of dramatic rituals.I have the I think good fortune to be living at the time which bridges writing and neo-iconic/neo-oral forms of data sharing. And frankly, I often find books are second- best or less. An example: I am a fan/follower of the works of Max Tegmark, whom partly I enjoy because he illustrates his ideas with bicycling stores. I have some of his written works, in fact, stored in my new Kindle Oasis which is at my side as I type. But I much more enjoy watching his videos, because then I can see his body language, his facial expressions, his emotional involvement in his work.Another example: I prefer even a mediocre performance of one of Shakespeare's plays to reading them.
I find digital publication a wonderfully democratic thing. This week I have read two sorts of memoirs. One was Bruce Chatwin's letters, published as 'Under the Sun'. An easy choice to publish for whoever is the head publisher of Viking&tc. this century. The other was a memoir by a young dude I saw on YouTube once, accidentally, who has been trying to carve out a career for himself as an entertainer, either in clubs or on the internet. They are both stories of people trying to find a way of living that is rewarding and answers their basic questions and pays the rent. One of the really nice things about reading them as ebooks is that they are equally printed. I can read Chatwin and Damien on the same medium, which takes away a lot of the glamour that can accompany the production given to 'big' authors.
The wider context of how I read, of whether or not I have books, is the emergence of the whole new, connected, electronic world in which I live. I had posted a memory on Facebook from a time that I 'owned; 117 things. A friend asked how many things I own now. I counted. It wasn't that hard, and Goodwill will probably benefit from my inventory. The number came to 142. But that's a cheat number, because most of what I 'own' is digital. Another friend, when I said I wouldn't know how to begin to count my digital stuff, suggested 'value'. 'This,' I suggested, 'is actually part of a much larger problem of how we value "things'"in a post-scarcity world, where "things" can be given away without losing them. A lot of very important productivity doesn't get counted because it can't be inventoried by bin number. What about, for example, the picture of a subdivision I posted in response to [a] link about city planning? I still have it in my computer. It's still on Google Earth View. Is that one thing or three things or four things?'
It makes no sense to consider the things that surround me in The Arcadia, my humble tiny house, as comprising my total possessions. (I am not even considering that many of my digital 'possessions' are not owned but merely licensed for my use.) Here I have a small cabinet for clothes, another small cabinet for food, a somewhat larger cabinet for everything else except what lives on two long plain wooden shelves, things like my one book, my game consoles, my Iron Man action figure. But I have at my disposal much more storage, and access to many more 'things'.
In exchange for my data, Google gives me data, and storage, and easy retrieval anywhere that has any sort of internet connection. We are slowly coming to realize that it is the data which are valuable, and some of us have our knickers knotted that our data are being stolen. It is, however, a subtle kind of thievery, if thievery it is, when I leave something in public view and someone 'takes' it, but I still have it, unaltered. Copyright is a complicated issue, which I do not pretend to be able to solve, but I would remind folks that there are heroic saints such as Columba who were copyright violators, who were exiled for stealing data.
No comments:
Post a Comment