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Not that Mr. Badger is a Luddite. He merely points out that technology has a mixed record. CB radio was a Toad mania long ago. Technology is sometimes, in the end, a little stupid--as anything must be that was brilliant yesterday but was surpassed overnight--a monster that lives on a hungry, dynamic need for its own obsolescence. The universe of Gutenberg should no more be an abandoned graveyard than, say, the American city, which, a generation after World War II, seemed to be in decline and headed toward extinction. Why did we need the cities when we had the new paradise of the suburbs? Who could ask for anything more?
It is a sound rule of travel, and of intellectual delight, to go where the others are not. Therefore, plunge back into books--not texts read in pixels off the screen, but read, rather, with their sweet weight of thought held in the hand. Go where others are not--to wonderful unread writers like Seneca or Plutarch, for example, whom I read during our blackout. They understood certain essentials that we have misplaced.
After three days, my computer sprang back to life, chipper, as if nothing had happened. I found myself wishing that a hard snow would fall on Seattle. Bill Gates and his geek brigades, I thought, need to sit in the dark for a while, or to light oil lamps and catch up on their reading.
I thought it, and nature responded with such biblical overreaction (the heaviest weather in the Pacific Northwest in 70 years, days of snow, ice, thaw, rainstorms, flood, power failures) that I began to feel guilty.