the striking sensational difference in the experiences of pressing a heart with a lead point into paper versus trapping a bracket and a number 3 in a text box that is in turn trapped within the dimensions of an LCD screen?
Deemed part of the tech-saavy generation, I fill my head with nostalgia and surround my body with the likewise physical--books--fingers running across the variable surfaces in attempt to appreciate their minute differences. Cherishing the fine grain and cool planes, wondering how all that can be pushed into oblivion by a single screen, I am like those "nineteenth-century travelers" who could not adapt their perceptual modes from the accustomed travel by carriage to travel by train (Schivelbusch).
I mean it's like I said before, no romance is lost on me because I see the beauty in it, the preservation and the possibility, the magic of holding worlds within a single screen but even though the novelty of riding in a horse-drawn carriage on a snow-strewn winter eve was made possible by their obsolescence in the realm of practical transportation, I don't want the same thing to happen to books and paper. I don't want them to become a thing of legend, though perhaps as artifacts they would draw the awestruck expressions that they deserve from a public that only recognizes a good thing once it is gone.
What I want is a happy harmony, like where we are now but without the feeling of foreboding. For people to hold on to one while embracing the other, but for the fearful grip that now characterizes the former to be replaced with a doting one.
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