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T’is true, there’s magic in the web of it

Even as I age, I sometimes find I am still scratching around for something to be proud of; something unique about me; something which I have not yet attempted in my dotage. But, amongst the forest of things from which I suppose I could choose, I didn’t consider a component of that metonymous forest, to wit a tree, ranked particularly high. But, I guess amongst other things, that is what Age is known for: cherry-picking unusual and seldom-related things as examples of wisdom: things which are not necessarily important for the crowd that surrounds them.

As an example, the culture and epoch in which I find myself embedded does not regard reading as a particularly specialist endeavour, although one might be tempted to question its variations I suppose: I prefer the feel of reading a hard cover book, although I will admit that it is more of a smellful touchy-feely thing and unguided by any added value. Until fairly recently, I have usually found myself drawn to the older, more recondite literature because I sometimes find it more hardscrabble to understand the meaning of many of today’s popular idioms (hardscrabble not being a member of that crowd).

But still, reading is reading, and despite its more recent camouflage, is still reaping a surprising harvest of different styles: gathering new words for the stew we all end up enjoying, if not entirely understanding. I mean, so what if the local library has been forced to surrender to digital formats and include computers in the stacks. At the very least it attracts those who do not possess smartphones, or find it tiresome to read from them; it also attracts those who do not wish to bring their tablets on a bus because it’s too easy for the stranger in the seat beside them to eavesread them.

But as an elder and still attached to tradition, I think it still behooves me to write a few words to retaliate against page-snobbery and paper hubris. Actually, I suppose one might think I should be the last to attempt to defend digital reading preferences -someone who texts as if I were still using a typewriter with one stiff index finger, and an inability either to accurately target those tiny smartphone keys, or the patience see them with enough clarity that I don’t have to constantly reread the message which the little daemon-of-the-chips has tried to correct before I send it.

Hats off to those who not only can see the little keys, but manage to hit them on the first try with their thumbs. I mean I had always assumed that opposable thumbs were designed for grasping objects or hitchhiking, not casting aside years of evolutionary change from long slender fingers and sometimes, like opossums (or is it ‘opossa’?), ditsy smaller thumbs for climbing things. Come to think of it though, maybe our having longer opposable thumbs are inadvertent exaptations, evolutionary spandrels that somehow anticipated (or is it the other way around?) the little smartphone keys. I mean perhaps it’s like asking how Nature knew to use the jaw bones of our ancient fish ancestors and repurpose them as the incus and malleus ear bones we need for listening to music with our headphones. Nature is very mysterious; of course so is texting and reading on smartphones I guess…

But merely accepting the magic of Nature and how it adapts does little to explain the youthful preference of reading things on a little screen that would be difficult to shave with, let alone practice tooth hygiene at bedtime (the relatively recent ability to reverse the direction of the screen for taking selfies notwithstanding).

But whatever, those of us who need to use the phone’s magnifier to read the ingredients on the side of cereal boxes, or the instructions on our prescription bottles, can thank our kids for showing us how to find the magnifier without our thumbs. Those are probably the same kids who manage to read Dostoevsky’s the Idiot on their screens, while we are still trying to figure out the emojis on ours. And we should not be so quick to criticize the fact that they actually figured out how to read the comic-book format of the novel on their screens; we elders wouldn’t have a clue how to do that or explain the story without a month’s preparation to find a library copy, and then the time to read it.

I suppose it all comes down to substance, eh? Should we be judging the story, the author, the style in which it was written, or the reason why it was written in the first place? Maybe books are a bit like like clothes: you dress in the fashion appropriate for the occasion. In its digital format, and in the aisle of a crowded bus, one can read a precis of what is needed from a story -its message, its style, and its usefulness- without acknowledging the sources. I remember using the Classic Comic Books of my time for the various book-reports I was assigned throughout high school. I mean, is there actually a difference from the use of AI summaries nowadays? Maybe in years hence, they too may seem like the once fashionable bell-bottom pants I once wore…

It’s not so much how you read surely, as what you read; there is as much trash, as much misinformation, and as much addictive stuff in books as online. Nowadays it’s just displayed in a different, quicker format than we older people are used to. I mean hurray for information; we just have to accept that there are different ways of obtaining it.

I’m impressed with the variety of knowledge the youth exhibit these days, and the way they’ve learned to dissect the many sources they encounter. The more varied it is, the broader their knowledge base, and the more choices their cerebral digestive mechanisms have on their plates to work with. Graphic novels, for example, are just one part of the acquisition of knowledge… or so I tell myself, looking back over my multi-flawed youth.

Understanding the world requires that we at least try to read it by one means or another, I think. And anyway at my age, as a fallback, I can always ask one of my kids to explain it to me…

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