A Legacy of ....

In today's Wall Street Journal, James Grant reviews the "Adams Unbound" exhibit at the Boston Public Library.  The exhibition of Adam's library, 3,510 volumes, is a remarkable insight into the mind, attitude and progress of a rare mind.  And this caused me to pause and consider this:  Bless our digital age, but what will be our personal intellectual and literary legacy enduring unto the fourth, fifth, sixth and subsequent generations?

I stand with one foot firmly planted in the world of books and the other foot on top of the uncertain and shifting dunes of pixels and bits.  I spent my formative years surrounded by books.  I slept beside an edition of the World Book Encyclopedia.  I spent ages at the Carnegie Library.  I was an English Lit. major and, as if that wasn't enough, I attended graduate school to study the business of book publishing and then toiled therein for a bit.  My own library that survives is well organized and contains most of what has made me, me. 

The books from college are inscribed with my name and student ID, so that they might be returned to me if we ever became separated.  The books I read now, I inscribe them with my name and the month and the year because I daydream that, someday, my children or their children might line them all up in chronological order then stare at their spines and see the path of my interests and the not so random forces that sculpted whatever intellectual character resides herein.  --Or not. 

I've noticed how my relationship with the book has changed and how I've come to appreciate it more than ever before.  This pixellated exposition flowing into a sea of machine consciousness seems to me to be a faint shadow of something not quite solid.  Here, upon the bitstream, we can easily see the quantum effects of time bending and shape shifting reality.  This is real and insubstantial all at once.  It is a sterile field compared to the rich loom of the book.

Think on it.  Today, we can hold a volume from John Adams' library in our hands and turn the pages and smell the parchment and read his marginalia.  His hand, moved by that rare mind, marked the page, emending it and marking this territory as discovered and conquered and civilized. 

A very dear friend, someone from my book days, urged me to read The Education of Henry Adams, so I did.  Henry was the great grandson of President John Adams and, through his book, evidenced his own rare intellect.  And so we wonder how much time Henry spent in his great-grandfather's library.  How many rainy Boston afternoons were spent surrounded by the musty, well-used volumes that were a catalog of how to become ... someone. 

When I consider the time we spend enthralled around cold fire of the television and computer screen, I grieve.  It seems to me that they may shine some sort of light, but rarely warms us up to take on today's challenges.  Rather, that cold light seems to numb us and hypnotize us and makes heroes of the popular and ordinary and vain and mean and those with the loudest voices in a land where Adams and Jefferson and Franklin once ruled in Enlightenment.