In search of lost nostalgia

If I'm reading a book, I can remember what page I'm on. It's hardly a superpower or a talent, barely even worthy of being called a trick, but I find it a slightly useful propensity - reading just before I go to sleep I wake up, pick up the book and think "ah, I stopped at page one hundred and forty seven. About halfway down". It saves a little skimming, a little re-reading, the odd accidental spoiler. And while I know that technology as basic as a bookmark - for which read absolutely any scrap of paper that happens to be lying about - would do the same job, it amuses me to be able to do it.

When I first got a Kindle at the end of last October (a kind parting gift from my lovely colleagues at Northcliffe) there was a lot about it I liked. The thing I disliked about it - and I disliked it viscerally, almost as a personal affront - was that my my utterly trivial mental trick of remembering page numbers had been rendered even less useful than it was before. The Kindle knew what page I was on. I need never remember a page number again.

It is hardly surprising that people dislike having their skills automated into obsolescence. Hard-won skills, economically crucial skills, fundamental life-skills: these are of the course the ones that it's hardest to watch automated away. One must sympathise on some level with the original Luddites and saboteurs who saw not only their livelihoods but their skills rendered meaningless. Typesetters, horse-drawn carriage builders, parrafin lamp makers...my heart really does go out to all of them a little bit. If it galls me that the Kindle takes away a frisson of pointless satisfaction from knowing which page of a novel I'm on, how much more devastating must it be to see a livelihood or a lifetime's work rendered suddenly unnecessary by a new technology?

So I sympathise, a little, with Bill Keller and his nostalgia for memorising whole novels and learning facts by rote, for mental arithematic, for the pre-web social experience, for more generally a time when humans were not drifting gleefully into cyborghood. Of course he wishes that it was still useful to recall the things he learned as a child; of course he wishes that mental arithematic was still a thing and that memorising whatever he happens to have memorised was not, after all, a waste of time. On some level I wish that it was still useful for me to remember page numbers. But it's not, and the Kindle is better than the books it replaces. And if I know that, perhaps so should he.