We’ll let these paragraphs stand as our epigraph for 2012:

There is to begin with the paraphernalia of daily living: all those objects, knives, combs, coins, cups, razors, that are too familiar, too worn and stained with use, a doorknob, a baby’s rattle, or too swiftly in passage from hand to mouth or hand to hand to arouse more than casual interest. They are disposable, and are mostly disposed of without thought. Tram tickets, matchboxes, wooden serviette rings with a poker design of poinsettias, buttonhooks, beermats, longlife torch batteries, the lids of Doulton soup tureens, are carted of at last to a tip and become rubble, the sub-stratum of cities, or are pulped and go to earth; unless, by some quirk of circumstance, one or two examples are stranded so far up the beach in a distant decade that they become collectors’ items, and then so rare and evocative as to be the only survivors of their age.

Survivors of their age, from The Museum of Everyday Life in Glover, Vermont museumofeverdaylife.org

So it is in the life of objects. They pass out of the hands of their first owners into a tortoiseshell cabinet, and then, whole or in fragments it scarcely matters, onto the shelves of museums. Isolated there, in the oddness of their being no longer common or repeatable, detached from their history and from the grime of use, they enter a new dimension. A quality of uniqueness develops in them and they glow with it as with the breath of a purer world — meaning only that we see them clearly now in the light of this one. An oil-lamp, a fragment of cloth so fragile that we feel the very grains and precious dust of its texture (the threads barely holding in their warp and woof), a perfume flask, a set of taws, a strigil, come wobbling towards us, the only angels perhaps we shall ever meet, though they bear no message but their own presence: we are here.

It is in a changed aspect of time that we recognise them, as if the substance of it — a denseness that prevented us from looking forward or too far back– had cleared at last. We see these objects and ourselves as co-existent, in the very moment of their first stepping out into their own being and in every instant now of their long pilgrimage towards us, in which they have gathered the fingerprints of their most casual users and the ghostly but still powerful presence of the the lives they served.

…We stare and are amazed. Were they once, we ask ourselves, as undistinguished as the buttons on our jacket or a stick of roll-on deodorant? Our own utensils and artefacts take on significance for a moment in the light of the future. Small coins glow in our pockets. Our world too seems vividly, unbearably present, yet mysteriously far off.

David Malouf, “In Trust,” The Complete Stories (New York: Vintage, 2007) pp.478-479

Is social media the path to perdition, as Bill Keller fears? Or to a glorious future where, as a character predicts in A Visit from the Goon Squad, "we'll know each other forever... we'll rise out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form"?

What is it about digital media that turns otherwise sensible journalists into latter-day Cotton Mathers? Case in point: Bill Keller’s recent jeremiad in May 22′s New York Times Magazine. His target: Twitter, that social media site where people meet and “tweet” to each other in 140 characters or less. Not only is Twitter making us stupid (or at least make smart people sound stupid, Keller waffles at the end), it threatens to destroy our very souls.

…my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our  ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity.

As with the predictions of the end of the world that failed to materialize the day this article arrived on my front porch, Keller’s fear for our imperiled souls is premature. We all may well be going to Hell in a handbasket, but I doubt Twitter is the cause. Demonizing the future  –as we at Obsolescing have pointed out time after time, (sounding like that now-obsolete broken record) — is an old and tired journalistic habit. Quick copy. Instant controversy.

What’s maddening is that Keller seems to understand this. In the heart of his essay, he offers vivid examples of the trade-offs society is always making as the new replaces the old. He begins by discussing Jonathan Foer’s recent book about memory, which asserts that the invention of the printing press eroded human’s ability to memorize literature.

He continues:

My father, who was trained in engineering at M.I.T. in the slide-rule era, often lamented the way the pocket calculator, for all its convenience, diminished my generation’s math skills. Many of us have discovered that navigating by G.P.S. has undermined our mastery of city streets and perhaps even impaired our innate sense of direction. Typing pretty much killed penmanship. Twitter and YouTube are nibbling away at our attention spans. And what little memory we had not already surrendered to Gutenberg we have relinquished to Google. Why remember what you can look up in seconds?

In other words: Thus as it has always been, thus it will always be. The obvious conclusion would be that, as a middle-aged parent of a 13-year-old daughter, Keller is behaving exactly like generations of parents before him. “And so he plays his part,” as Shakespeare wrote. With good-humored humility, Keller would then admit he’s entered the fifth age: “the justice.”

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances …

But no. Somehow, even as he waves away his father’s concerns over his math deficiencies, Keller seems to believe that this time is different, that his own parental concerns are somehow more valid. The digital technologies of the current age pose greater threats and perils than ever before.

What he doesn’t understand is that the present is always the most arrogant –and most benighted– of perspectives. From that high perch, we can dismiss the follies of those who have come before (“I would certainly not give up the pleasures of my library for the ability to recite “Middlemarch.” Keller writes.) while making ominous pronouncements about the dangers ahead in the scary unknown.

To back up his argument, Keller concludes by quoting novelist Meg Wolitzer, who describes a teenage character in The Uncoupling as belong to “The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.”

Whether this quote reflects Wolitzer’s point of view or is quoted, out of context, from a middle-aged character’s mouth, I don’t know. I haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading The Uncoupling. Instead of Wolitzer, I turn to Jennifer Egan and her brilliant novel A Visit from the Goon Squad to counter Keller.  Hailed as an “inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age, displaying a big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed,” by the Pulitzer-Prize committee, Goon Squad offers argument and antidote to any tiresome anti-technology sermons.

By following a loosely interconnected group of characters over a 40-year span, from the 1970s into a near future, Egan explores how we, as human beings, simultaneously embrace and flee from the changes that time – that “goon” of the title – inevitably brings. Like Shakespeare, she regards the various “stages of man,” the many parts we will play in a lifetime, with a detached precision and intimate sympathy.

Much of the change Goon Squad addresses is technological. Readers glimpse one character, a visionary grad student in the mid-1980s, experimenting with a prototype of the Internet (“Oh, we’ll know each other forever,” Bix says. “That days of losing touch are almost gone.”) We see a future iteration of Twitter, a corruptible tool for stealth marketing and a source of unexpected poetry. And there is one luminous chapter “written” entirely as a series of PowerPoint slides composed by a teenager. (Her Mom, a character readers know first as a wild, impulsive and sentimental young woman, is suspicious: “Why not try writing for a change?” “Excuse me, this is my slide journal.”)

Ultimately, time is the only medium that matters, the tough, tidal current keeps pulling us back and sweeping us forward. That tide surges inside us too. Goon Squad so richly explores themes close to Obsolescing’s heart, that I could go on and on (I will say Orpheus and Eurydice make a brief appearance). I’ll leave its delights for you to discover on your own.

The book’s final chapter (SPOILER ALERT) provides the most pointed retort to Keller. Set in a near-future Manhattan, a dystopia of buzzing surveillance helicopters, barricades against the rising sea, ever taller buildings blocking air and light, and a marketplace dictated by the whims of three-year olds and manipulated via paid “influentials” generating buzz, this chapter could be viewed as fodder for Keller’s fears. Except the airless, lightless Manhattan functions not just as dystopian vision but also a metaphor for the onset of middle age, that time when horizons vanish, even as the next generation, voiced by one character’s 3-year-old daughter, chirps “Up, up, up.”

That character, returning for the first time from the first chapter, is guiltily involved in engineering buzz for an “impromptu” downtown concert. New Yorkers pour into the streets and pack Lower Manhattan, oblivious to the fraud. But the concert, miraculously, transcends its suspect origins. The crowd, the excitement, the music itself — the human need for connection and expression and depth and uplift — work some kind of alchemy, transforming the fabricated into the spontaneous and genuine, the event into legend.

The novel ends wistfully, as it must. Egan might even agree with Keller  (as I do): “…innovation often comes at a price. And sometimes I wonder if the price is a piece of ourselves.” What Egan gets and Keller doesn’t is that we’re always paying that price. We are all prisoners of the zeitgeist. We accept and absorb the tools and toys and various means our culture gives us and use them to distract ourselves, to wound each other, to seek quick fixes, gratification, acclaim. And we use them too, to connect, create, and delve deeply. Our souls (and our lives) are always in danger,  Egan tells us, and always open to unexpected grace.

Maybe it’s unfair of me to pit a novelist against a journalist. We expect novels to be deeper and more subtle than newspaper essays have the luxury to be. But Keller, in quoting Wolitzer, neglects to mention that back when novels were, well, novel, they too were decried as corrupters of souls (see Bovary, Madame). As for journalism, wasn’t it once the most ephemeral of media?

As to Keller’s assertion that Twitter makes smart people sound stupid, I can only answer that as a writer I’m kind of proud of the Tweet I composed to summarize A Visit from the Goon Squad:

What Egan gets: We’re all prisoners of the zeitgeist. There will be casualties & survivors, corruption & transcendence in = measure.

In under 140 characters, I think I say it all.

Slow internet movement favors old-fashioned dial-up over hi-speed wireless

I’m a bit behind (like 7 weeks!) on this story, which aired on “All Things Considered” at the beginning of April. Reporter Melissa Block visited Drip, a coffee house in Washington, D.C. that caters to so-called slow netters, as devotees of the new slow internet movement call themselves.  The trend-setting cafe eschews high-speed internet for basic dial-up.

Late though I am, Obsolescing had to alert its readers to this surprising trend:

Dial-up Internet is enjoying a huge comeback as the slow-net wave (partly inspired by the slow food movement) crashes onto hipster shores nationwide.

OK Go frontman Damian Kulash has written the trend’s anthem. The song is called “Love Me Longtime.”

Listen to “Love Me Longtime”

[2 min 37 sec]

• Add to Playlist

“It’s about the Internet when it was a more tactile experience — when it took something to be on the Internet,” Kulash says.

Kulash used dial-up’s classic series of tones as supplemental percussion in his ode. “That sound is kind of like The Beatles to my parents, it calls back out all the rage and lust and hormones of my youth,” Kulash tells All Things Considered. “Really powerful sound.”

Listen to the entire report here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2011/04/01/135041848/ok-gos-damian-kulash-crafts-pro-dial-up-anthem. You’ll find all the familiar tropes for talking about a now obsolete technology. Kulash revels in the sensory details, the “tactile experience,” while others interviewed celebrate the noisy scritch and beep of attempted connection as a nearly Proustian trigger of fond memories. Throughout the report devotees insist that slowness, clunkiness, unreliability are somehow more authentic or, even, more human.

Before you listen to the report, though, you might want to check out the dateline.

April 1, 2011

Yes, this report was one of NPR’s elaborate April Fool’s jokes. It worked brilliantly because the reporters knew the lingo of obsolescing. Yet, in the letters aired a few days later, one listener (inevitably?) wrote:

Am I the only one who was disappointed when they realized it was the gag story? He continues: I live a somewhat conflicted life. I am at the same time nostalgic for technology of days gone by, yet I work in the IT industry with current technology. But I resist new technology as much as possible. No smartphone, no Bluetooth, and yes, still dial-up at home. Others make fun of me, of course, and I was excited to be able to share news of this anti-bandwidth revolt with them.

P.s.I still have my original Commodore 64 somewhere in the attic.

Hope this is a joke that works no matter what the date. Belated April Fool’s!

I came across this Billy Collins’ poem in a book I plucked off my shelf, Best American Poetry 1992. No commentary (at least not on my part) is necessary. Read and/or scroll down to listen.

Nostalgia

Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code.

The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

Billy Collins, “Nostalgia” from Questions About Angels.
Copyright © 1991 by Billy Collins.

Once I was a horse-drawn carriage

For some time, I’ve been musing about how often new technologies hold some vestige of the technology they’re usurping. Sometimes, the form of a new technology evolves, seemingly naturally,  from its predecessor — think of the horsedrawn carriage becoming horseless carriage becoming auto-mobile (still with a “body by Fisher,” coachworkers turned auto body designers.) Sometimes, the new takes cues from the old to gain cachet and legitimacy from what it’s replacing — think of old-fashioned movie theaters, the screen on a proscenium stage, a thick velvet curtain opening and closing between acts. And sometimes the new masquerades as the old as a kind of reassurance that change is not all that radical or scary — the wolf in sheep’s clothing approach — electric light sneaking into the house in the form of candelabras and candle-shaped wall sconces.

I used to be wax and flame

What I didn’t know — until yesterday — was this phenomenon has a name.

Skeuomorph

Pronounced SKEW-o-morph, the word is defined as “a design feature copied from a similar artifact, even when not functionally necessary.” Examples include copper cladding on a zinc penny, the black and white “cowhide” cover of a standard composition book, the reassuring shutter snap on a digital camera.

I used to be leather

I discovered this most useful term in Joshua Brustein’s essay “Why Innovation Doffs an Old Hat” in Sunday’s New York Times. Brustein’s essay was prompted by Amazon’s announcement that its e-reader Kindle will now include page numbers corresponding to the pages of physical books. While Brustein acknowledges some practical advantages to the Kindle’s retro-fit (for book clubs who want readers — paper or cyber — to be on the same page, as it were), he points out the absurdity as well.  “E-books, by definition, do not have pages.” In other words, if good design is defined as “form follows function” then page numbers on e-books are as fussy and antiquated as an anti-macassar on a chair back. But if good design helps create a bridge between old and new, then the page numbers make sense. They conform, says designer Adam Greenfield “to the emotional expectations of what a book is.”

Superficial illusion or meaningful allusion? In an age of fast-paced technological change, such is the designer’s dilemma. Writes Brustein:

Designers in all fields are regularly confronted with versions of this choice: whether to incorporate cues to keep people grounded in what has come before, or scrap convention completely.

This is hardly a new phenomenon. The word skeuomorph was coined by 19th century archaeologists to describe ancient architects’ allusion to wooden construction techniques in stone temples (see the Wikipedia entry on “skeumorph.“).

I used to be wood

And at the turn of the 20th century, both the Arts and Crafts Movement and the Machine Aesthetic developed in reaction against what one might call “skeumorphic abuse” — manufacturers’ use of new technology to mass produce cheap imitations of traditional handicrafts, transferring the complex patterns of Oriental rugs to sheets of linoleum, for example.

Some skeuomorphs work. Others are clunky and awkward. (See my post of several months back on digital icons, which I now know to call “skeumorphic interfaces”.) Successful skeuomorphs don’t just “keep people grounded,” though, they bridge the transition from the comfortable familiar to the challenging unknown. In other words, a metaphor. Writers aren’t the only ones skilled at making those connections. The best and most useful designs often depend on creating clear metaphors that make a new technology not just less threatening but also more accessible. Without that connection, the new might be completely incomprehensible. The point of a metaphor, in design as well as literature, is to help us leap the chasm.

Much more than “superfluous references to the past,” as Brustein calls them, these bridges serve an important value. As UCLA anthropologist Nicholas Gessler writes:

Skeuomorphs are material metaphors. They are informational attributes of artifacts which help us find a path through unfamiliar territory. They help us map the new onto an existing cognitive structure, and in so doing, give us a starting point from which we may evolve additional alternative solutions. They provide us with “a path” instead of “no path” at all, but as scientists we are ultimately interested in an optimal paths well suited to the problem at hand, if not simply the best solution possible.

Paradoxically, it’s the looking back, the incorporating the old in the new, that keeps us moving forward.

The time comes, of course, when the new becomes familiar, the original allusion is forgotten, and the metaphor itself dies. Already I’ve heard tales of design students marveling that the words “cut and paste” once referred to literal scissors and glue. And how often do we think of speedy, hoofed creatures when we talk about a car’s horsepower? Those words linger as the last vestige of  technologies now long forgotten.

So now I’m collecting nominations — what skeuomorphs do you notice in your daily life? When do they work? When do they seem “superfluous”? In a future posting, I’ll list the best and worst of what readers have found.

In honor of January, the month that looks in two directions, my friend and fellow blogger Kitti Carriker just wrote two lovely posts about Obsolescing. While the three (!) blogs that Kitti keeps are literary in focus, her observations, reflections, and especially her attention to small moments and fine details make her very much a kindred spirit. Her description of this blog as “nostalgic, visionary” applies to her own accomplishments as well. Kitti is a keen observer, and her blogs record and honor small moments and fine details that, once noticed and acknowledged, resonate with significance. She is adept at finding connections, weaving patterns — she is a lover of seasons and other cycles, and the ceremonies that mark and celebrate time’s passage.

Kitti’s appraisal inspired me to looking back at my sporadic postings over the last year and a half. What I realize is that the backward glance has dominated, that the elegaic tone has dominated.  Our intent has never been to be focused solely on what’s passing, but to look forward as well, to show the inventive ways in which old technologies are remade, revived, reinterpreted, often by artists and other innovators too young to remember when vinyl records, turntables, Polaroid film, to name just a few examples, were merely utilitarian and banal. In invoking Janus, Kitti has reminded me to look ahead with youthful eyes and celebrate surprising metamorphoses.

For the time being, though, I anticipate postings may continue to be sporadic. for exciting (and forward looking) reasons. My novel, Nelly the Wanderer, is in the final stages of revision, and I am working to meet a spring deadline.

So if you’re looking for a good read in the meantime, check out Kitti Carriker’s literary blogs:
www.kitticarriker.blogspot.com
www.kittislist.blogspot.com
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

She has given us at Obsolescing– and I hope our readers too — a gift for the still young year. January may end today. But Janus will from here on be our guide as we look both backward and forward.

Thanks Kitti!

The relentless march of time and technology claimed another victim – the residential phone book.

Phone books hold special nostalgia for me and my family as they were the major resource in my father’s business as a Hollywood researcher. The bulk of work done at de Forest Research was name-checking, and his immense library held every major city phone book, past and present. When a Jonah Cross showed up in a 1930s LA directory, my father recommended “Chinatown’s” producers change their villain’s first name to “Noah,”to avoid any potential lawsuits. My father always jokes that was his one contribution to cinematic art.

As a summer employee of de Forest Research, I logged many hours poring over the fine print on those flimsy pages. I took pleasure in what was basically a mindless, mechanical task by noting certain patterns and coincidences, discovering intriguingly unusual names (who is “Z Methuselah IV”?)  and enjoying the occasional accidental poetry in those corner juxtapositions of letters (Zip-Zub, or even better, Boy-Bra).

But then I’m weird.

I can’t really imagine much weeping over the loss of the phone book. Children who need a boost to sit at the family dinner table will have to find a substitute, of course. Still, like an encyclopedia, the phone directory, especially the fat directory of a major city, gave the illusion of completeness. The phone book held an entire world between its pasteboard covers. Of course, the internet holds a far vaster world, yet, lacking the corporal heft of a dictionary, encyclopedia, or phone book, it feels somehow less complete. We have easy access to the parts but no sense of the whole.

Hey, Virginia. Give me a call. We have lots to talk about.

I’m a little slow posting an entry this week, though I almost felt like there was no need, since Virginia Heffernan covered my beat in her Medium column in last Sunday’s NYT Magazine (1o/31). “Funeral for a Friend” reads the headline, over a photo of a very shiny, very black, very basic touchtone telephone. Vintage 1978, I’m guessing, one of those sturdy, square-edged models from the days before the break-up of AT&T, when phones were solid and heavy as tanks.Owned by the “company,” leased by the consumer, these “landlines,” the only telephone connections we had,were built to last.

Reach Out and Touch Someone

But it wasn’t the  hardware Heffernan was eulogizing. Her column focused instead on the the loss of a particular experience that the telephone had once made possible:

… the old phones — wireful phones, defined by the strong visible insulated copper circuits that crosshatched the land — came to be indispensable to anyone who longed for a complex social and emotional and aesthetic life, a reliable vocal-auditory miracle, intimacy, friendship, romance, furious down-slammings, hissed interruptions and the awesomely strange sensation, via the mouth- and earpieces, of being inside someone else’s accent, intonations and sighs, ear canal and larynx and lungs.

I’ve long been a fan of Heffernan and her column The Medium, with its sharp, often quirky analyses of the ways new and old media converge in our lives. Every now and then, she takes a look backward and focuses on topics dear to us at Obsolescing. She’s not immune to the tug of nostalgia, but writes about the past with a refreshing self-awareness.She may lament certain losses, but, unlike many cultural critics, rarely falls into the trap of assuming that her — or her generation’s — cultural currency trumps any others.

In last Sunday’s essay, she does employ the standard idioms for talking about old and new. The past is “warm” and human; the present “shallow” and impersonal. With cell phones, she writes:

You no longer have the luxury to listen for over- and undertones; you listen only for content. Calls have become transactional, not expressive.

And if the essay had ended there, I would have been citing this article as just one more example of a writer fetishizing technologies past. But she understands that hers is a generational perspective (that self-awareness I was talking about), that those who never got to experience the particular voice-in-ear intimacy of a long drawn-out conversation with a best friend on an analog telephone, will have another kind of experience tied to another kind of communications device. Who knows? In 20 years, next generation’s Virgnia Heffernan may write an incisive, wistful paean to thumb-typing text messages.

Or in Heffernan’s words: “We haven’t lost intimacy. We have lost only telephones.”

Not from my cell phone

When I send a text message on my cell phone an amusing icon appears: an old-fashioned envelope, graced with wings, flying into a sturdy, equally old-fashioned mailbox.  The envelope and mailbox strike me as kind of lame. But watching the cartoon envelope fly across the screen the other day got me musing about the proliferation of icons on computers and cell phones, and how the past has been preserved in these graphic allusions to technologies passing or past. Glancing down at my MacBook dock I see a parade of miniaturized objects — a guitar, a curtained photo booth, a piece of paper with a pen resting on it, a desk calendar — whose function has been replaced by the much blander looking white machine I type on now. My word processor is even better, equipped with “tools” whose functions are described by visual analogy — a pencil, an eraser, a ruler, scissors, clipboard, magnifying glass.

This means "cut"

The best icons are intuitive and practical. The mind grasps the meaning of a an “eraser” or “trash can” faster than the words that would explain those meanings. Some icons, though, strike me as strained in their attempt to “quote” a visual precedent. The winged letter falls in this category. Maybe because it serves no practical purpose. It merely alludes to an obsolescing technology of message sending because — hey, that’s what icons are supposed to do! I guess it’s the visual equivalent of a cliché (a word that itself alludes to a now long-gone technology, though that’s the subject of another post).

What’s most intriguing about these icons is that they may outlive the object they refer to. Future generations will know what an image of an envelope, postage stamp, or telephone means even when those objects have long since disappeared from daily life. Technologies past are preserved in all sorts of ways. In today’s media, icons are one of the most ubiquitous.

When's the last time you've seen one of these?

Fall Tree #2 by Lisa Discepoli Line; Oil on Canvas, 24x18"

We have entered the season of change and loss. The mornings are dark. Here in Philadelphia, the trees are just starting to turn. Autumn has come quickly this year, all too suddenly wet, cold and gray after a searing summer with no rain at all.

What does any of this have to do with waning technology?

Good question. I think that the emotions that autumn elicits, the melancholy my own primitive soul starts feeling as the days shorten, are akin to the distress and sorrow we feel as the objects of our life, the utilitarian technologies that once surrounded and defined us, fade into memory. News of a past technology’s demise makes us suddenly, desperately long to hold, to touch, to smell, to hear the things of our past. Like Orpheus leading his beloved from the Underworld, we look back to reassure ourselves that the everyday things we have known and loved and remember still exist in their full corporeal presence (That’s why we revel in the sensory details — the typewriter’s clacking keys, the mimeograph ink’s distinctive scent.) Instead, we turn back to watch, in sadness and horror, as the objects of our lives, the tangible evidence of our own existence, slip from our outstretched arms.

So even though technology does not appear in the poem below, I offer it today in the spirit of the season. Next time you find yourself mourning the loss of movie projectors, film cameras, incandescent light bulbs, or old 45s, think of the last line of this poem. Who is it you mourn for?

Spring and Fall:

to a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins