My father was a librarian, an archivist, and a rare books collector. I grew up surrounded by books which were a hundred years older than I was nestled beside stacks of long-defunct short-lived Irish literary magazines, many of which were never digitized. My father would open his latest find to the copyright page, explaining why this particular object had value (not of the fiscal variety). The book was a link in a chain, a talisman of a continuum. Within the crush of shelved books he always knew where to find the one he wanted. In the middle of a discussion he would slowly get up, walk to a shelf, pull out a book, and read the relevant passage. An example. In the late 1990s, my sister Jean and I went to Ireland to visit my younger sister Siobhan in studies overseas. While Siobhan was in class, Jean and I drove west and stopped at Clonmacnoise, an old monastery complex in ruins on the banks of the Shannon River in County Offaly. We had been there as kids but this trip was in November, off-season, and the expanse was deserted. We wandered along the sloping hills, weaving through the tilting lichen-encrusted Celtic crosses and slabs of ancient graves. The river snaked by below us, green grasses pushed up on the sides, melting into the water, no visible shoreline. Something about the river’s surface and the flatness in which it rests is oddly dizzying. On a clear day the sky is perfectly reflected in the water and the world seems upside down. I got vertigo. Once home, I told my father about the strange Clonmacnoise-illusion. He stood up, crossed to his bookshelves, scanned the titles briefly and then pulled out a volume. It was Seamus Heaney’s recently published Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996. He flipped the pages briskly then read aloud in the gravelly voice now faded to an echo in my brain: The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise Were all at prayers inside the oratory A ship appeared above them in the air. The anchor dragged along behind so deep It hooked itself into the altar rails And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill, A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope And struggled to release it. But in vain. ‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’ The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back Out of the marvelous as he had known it. My father gave me his copy of Opened Ground and I still have it. I also have little trinkets clustered on the windowsills — an angel made of twisted metal, a broken music box, a tiny piece of clear beach glass — all given to me by people I love. Remembering is a tactile experience. In Joachim Trier’s film The Worst Person in the World, in 2021, Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a man dying of cancer, struggles to explain himself to his ex-girlfriend Julie (Renate Reinsve). “I grew up in an age without Internet and mobile phones,” he tells her. Julie gives him a look that I, a Gen-Xer, know well. She is sympathetic, but there’s a little bit of something else there, almost embarrassment at his nostalgia. Aksel sees the look on Julie’s face and his smile is sad. He continues: I sound like an old fart. But I think about it a lot. The world that I knew has disappeared. For me it was all about going to stores. Record stores. I’d take the tram to Voices in Grünerløkka. Leaf through used comics at Pretty Price. I can close my eyes and see the aisles at Video Nova in Majorstua. I grew up in a time when culture was passed along through objects. They were interesting because we could live among them. We could pick them up. Hold them in our hands. Compare them…I spent my life doing that. Collecting all that stuff, comics, books. And I just continued, even when it stopped giving me the powerful emotions I felt in my early 20s. I continued anyway. And now it’s all I have left. Knowledge and memories of stupid, futile things nobody cares about… I, too, think about it a lot. Before the internet, you had to collect things, especially if you were interested in movies, books, and music. The concept of ownership has been transformed. We no longer expect ownership to be permanent. You can purchase a movie on a streaming platform, but you are beholden to the platform’s landlords. If they want to dump the movie it’s gone for you, too. If a movie is not streaming, good luck finding it. (Same goes for my father’s undigitized Irish literary magazines: what treasures were in those pages, lost to us forever?) And so I evangelize for owning stuff. Do not trust a corporation with anything that matters to you. With every advance in technology, things are lost. They (there’s always a “they”) want us to believe that everything is now available with the internet. It’s a lie. The feudal system survives and not only in memory. Much of human history was lived by people who did not own the land they worked. They were enslaved, or in perpetual crushing debt. Today’s overlords do not see the value in regular people being able to make a living, having a place to live, or even enjoying some leisure time. Nostalgia was once considered a clinical disease, listed and discussed in medical journals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A combination of the Greek nostos (home) and algos (pain, distress), it spices up a lot of great art. James Joyce’s nostalgia is different from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s. L.M. Montgomery wrote twenty novels, starting with Anne of Green Gables in 1908, and all of them granted her return to Prince Edward Island where she spent her childhood. Turning back the clock is impossible, but technological advancement forces erasure. You
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence