I know that I waste a lot of time during the day looking at something on a screen. “But it can be educational!” you say. Yes and no. I can use the computer as an encyclopedia to find out, for a recent example, what the date of Easter was in 1594. I can also use it, for another recent example, to fetch me a copy of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, when my own copy is 750 miles away. I cannot, however, so well use it to make me want to read the books it makes available, because the mechanism militates against it. You can curl up with a book. You don’t curl up with a computer. You can feel the texture of a book’s cover. Your eyes note the light and the shadows on the page. The paper has a vague and sometimes pleasant scent about it. The only distraction from the book is the real world beyond. The computer is a machine of constant distraction, even from the thing you are looking at. It distracts the eye and the mind, in the old literal sense: it pulls them apart.
A copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost lies on the table in front of me. It is a Signet edition, with an introduction that is quite inadequate to the grandeur and the erudition of the poem. Another copy lies on the table beside me. It is from Hackett Press, reprinting the old Merritt Y. Hughes edition, which is rich indeed in thought, historical and linguistic research, and presentations of the old astronomy of Ptolemy and the new astronomy of Galileo. I am memorizing Paradise Lost. I am now more than halfway through Book Ten; a little more than 80 percent of the whole. I find that I “see” the words on one book’s pages differently from those on the other. That brings not confusion but complexity; it makes for a more thorough network, as when I have listened to Gordon MacRae and Tennessee Ernie Ford singing “O Holy Night” together, with the strands of both baritones interweaving. If I look up from the book, right now, I see my son’s copy of a Bach fugue resting on the keyboard, and behind it a window with shades half open, through which I see an old spruce tree with its gnarled bark and its branches gently waving in the wind, as it’s a cool day outside and the rain is coming. I see a world in the home and outside of the home. The family dog is sleeping on a pillow on the chair nearby. The cat has finished cleaning his paws and has now shut his eyes. Absolutely nothing I see on the computer is as full of meaning, readily available to the mind and without reduction or chaos or distraction, as is the small scene before me. (RELATED: Make America Literate Again)
If we want to teach children how to read good books, we must put good books before them, in their hands. If we want to teach them how to write, we would do well to have them write, with their hands, their fingers.
It seems to me that the neurologists will eventually come around to confirm what common sense already knows. If we want to teach children how to read good books, we must put good books before them, in their hands. If we want to teach them how to write, we would do well to have them write, with their hands, their fingers. The pen, the ink, the paper, the feel of them, the slash and stab of many a boy’s cursive, the flowery loops of many a girl’s, or the peculiar character of printing, as you make letters for your own eyes as much as for someone else’s, all contribute to making the silent utterance of the written word as complex as it can be, immersed in a human world, both within the writer and without. I find, for example, that if I want to write poetry, I must form the words with my fingers, and in such a way that each letter stands out: I must print them, and that forces me to go slow, and to see the very sounds of the letters and the words, to see them and to hear them, since they will bear in their character the impress of my personality, even the grip of my hand and the pressure it brings to bear on the paper. What I write this way now is thus made one, in my eyes, my hands, my mind, my memory, even the imagination of my uttering the words with my voice and no one else’s, with what I have written before, as long as 40 and 50 years ago.
And where did I write such things? The computer is a no-place. It is uniformly flat. But when I began to translate Dante’s Inferno, I knew where I was, and I knew when it was. I can see the small room. We were on vacation, having taken an apartment for two weeks in the little town of Lubec, Maine. It was summertime, in the year 2000. My wife and our two children were there. I was on the floor, with the Italian in front of me, and a notebook. I began to “etch” the words on the paper, in that same print I use to write poetry with, but slanted. I do not know why, when I translate poetry, I slant my print, but perhaps it has something to do, in the deep wells of personality, with a sense that the words are not mine, but someone else’s. In any case, that is when and where I began.
We must never underestimate the power of the hand. Yesterday, I used a circular saw with an old blade to cut a big piece of plywood for use as a door for our rickety old barn. Since the blade was old and since plywood can be notoriously capricious, I had to use all the muscular force in my arm to keep the saw from swerving and grinding into the plywood, which I was cutting along the length, at a slight angle to fit the not-quite-rectangular opening it was to go in. I can see in my mind’s eye the machine and the blade and the plywood; I can smell the wood as it burned and blackened against the side of the saw. I had to shave it two or three times to get it just right. My upper arm today is swollen from the work, but it’s a “good” swell. The twinge in my forearm as I make a fist, though, isn’t — a touch of arthritis in these old bones, I guess. The memory of it also brings into play a world: the barn, the grass, the frame I used to hold the plywood, my wife’s surprise, the white paint I brushed on it, the barn-red of the old hemlock siding; none of this comes from a screen.
Even diagramming a sentence falls into the same category. I see, in my mind’s eye, the chalk on a blackboard when I was a child, as I formed the line for the main clause. I see a picture of the sentence developing — by my hand. Of course, it is an abstraction. But it is not only that. The very chalk prevents it from being so. I must stand at the board to make the picture. I must draw the lines. I must choose where they go, and so I put the chalk to the board on this place and not that. It was the same when I did a problem in arithmetic, though mostly I knew the answer immediately, and did not need to get to the board. Lately, I’ve taken to looking at the patterns of remainders when you divide a number and its powers by a prime number that isn’t one of its factors. It is one thing to say that for any prime p, if p mod 6 = 1, there will be non-zero integers m and n such that m^2 + m + 1 = np. It is another thing to see it making itself manifest under my fingers, in my writing: to see that 100 + 10 + 1 = 3(37), and that 1225 + 35 + 1 = 13(97). The patterns take form as I draw them out, and as I circle every instance in which the remainder is 1 or -1 (that is, p – 1). They are pretty. I am absorbed in them, just as I was when I was three years old and first took a pen or a crayon to the pieces of cardboard we got when my mother sent out my father’s shirts to the dry cleaners, and traced out the words that came to me, printing. (RELATED: Keep the End in View)
None of this even touches the utterly antisocial features of the screen, the bitterness, the pornography, the angry tweets, the self-parading, and the reduction of human persons to tags — no real voice, no real face, no set of the eyes, no movement of the hands. In a few minutes, I will be going outdoors to a different kind of schooling for this old professor, as a friend of ours is coming over to do carpentry work on our dormer window, with me as his assistant, up a ladder I’ve hung at an angle over the peak of the roof, or on the ground making with his excellent chop-saw or table-saw a piece of PVC “wood” to precise specifications, so as to fit into the contours of an old house that doesn’t have a single wall that’s plumb or a corner that’s right. The earth below, the sky above, asphalt shingles and screws and nails and wood and whatnot — a man-made world at home in the world; it is literally at my fingertips.
Will our schoolteachers and principals learn the lesson?
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