It was all quite evident to me, after I had wasted a couple of hours looking for Waley’s poem, that things had gone to hell, as my mother Franny would have said. My “search” for the poem was proof of that—I should have gone to my bookcase, pulled out the little but quite thick book of “Great Poems of the English Language,” and begun leafing around page 400 or so—where the Victorians / Edwardians live. It’s a respectable neighborhood, and I would run into some great poems, often written by friends of Waley. He got around, was part of the Bloomsbury Group, knew the Sitwells and Ezra Pound.
Searches were inefficient, of course, but I could have wasted a very productive afternoon in finding / not finding Waley on the yellow-covered paperback book that has my brother’s name on it but which he probably never read. The journey was the destination, and if—never encountering Waley—I had had to re-read “Dover Beach” or “The Second Coming,” or Wilfred Sassoon and Edith Sitwell…well, the afternoon would have been delightful.
Well, the termites took the book off, and I’m left with my cell phone, which does and doesn’t in a way no book would dream of. My cell phone wants to give me what the algorithm for Arthur Waley is, or what it expects. In this case it’s The Tale of Genji, which I may in fact download and bind. But the faded yellow-paper back would have been there or it would not. The poem would be living around page 400—or it would have moved out. But I type one thing into my phone and it gives me another—it’s like reaching for a can of peas at the supermarket and finding almonds in your hand.
How easy it would be, I thought, for AI to remove all traces of the Trump indictment. One day, I type “Jack Smith Trump Indictment” into the Google search engine, and what do I get? Error code 440—file not found. More worrisome, the file might disappear not because of any one person making that decision, and typing in the command “delete existence of Jack Smith probe” into the system. The system, or the program, or the soul of the beast might come up with it on its own. A guy named Geoffrey Hinton says that there’s a 20% chance that AI will destroy humanity. Here’s a screen shot of a CNN article:
They’ve certainly been clever about it. Our phones know everything about us, which means the government knows everything about us. So I am paying about 80 bucks a month to a company that will sell my secrets and my life to the government. However, my phone also shows me pictures of cute babes with big boobs, which is the important thing.
Getting something off the internet, I think, would be easy. There might be pockets where the file still lurks, in some obscure server in Uzbekistan, perhaps, but the power of the internet would eventually prevail.
Libraries would be no problem. The easiest thing to do would simply be to get people not to open books. Not because you had told them not to, but because they didn’t know enough or care enough to have any interest. Burning books, or putting them in “Rare Book Collections” is bad form. Unless, of course, you really do need the theater.
The only chance, I thought, was a book NOT in a public library. A book in private hands. Something handed down from generation to generation. Mothers, giving the daughters the book at the end of their lives, and telling them, “here…read this…it wasn’t always like this…keep the memory alive.” Fathers, giving their sons the books that their grandparents had bound in the leather or fabric scraps found around the house.
Books resting in attics, sleeping in trunks, dozing on book shelves.
Bombs, ready to explode.
As they will, perhaps, if an honest historian gets their hands on them.
We’re lucky both in what we have (each manuscript is a miracle) and in what we don’t know that we don’t have. For any book to survive from Plato’s time to the present day is a miracle. The Codex Sinaiticus is one of our oldest bibles, and it only goes back to the 4th century.
I had found the poem and I had found the path. The way was clear, all the way to The Poet’s Passage.
Let the poems begin!
