It Is Written — Reflections on Moving To Another Country
IT IS WRITTEN
- Michael Rosenblum
Moving house, and moving to another country, means you have to pack everything up.
This gives you a rather unique opportunity to step back and take a look at what you have accumulated over a lifetime, and why.
We are in New York because we had to come back to pack up our NY apartment. We had to pack it up because we have sold it. In 1519, when the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez landed in the New World with 600 men, he famously burned his ships so there would be no going back. We have done the same, though far less dramatically. On November 28th we will board our one-way BA flight back to the UK to start an entirely new life, totally committed (and able to drive!).
We have lived in this apartment in Manhattan for more than 17 years now, and so there is a lot to pack up, or get rid of — these events being great moments for clearing out the accumulated detritus of a lifetime that you once thought you ‘might need one day’, after all — one never knows.
The biggest thing to pack up (as thankfully the buyers are taking the place fully furnished), is my books. I have, over the course of a lifetime, accumulated more than 2,000 of them, (not counting the ones that are already in the UK), and that is a lot to pack up and move.
John Adams, second President of the United States and a leader in the American Revolution (or perhaps as I should now start to call it, the terrorist insurrection against Crown and Country) wrote in 1781, “You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.” He was famous for always carrying a book with him. Of course, this was in the days before iPhones.
As I have spent my life in the media/tech world, many of my friends are mystified at my fixation and love for physical books. “Why keep them when you can have them all on your iPad?” they ask. But to me, as I fill cardboard box and after cardboard box, there is something inherently different about a hard-covered book. When I read, I like the weight of a book. I like the feel of the paper. I like the smell of it. I like to write small notes in the margins or underline things. Years later, when an idea strikes me, I can still find the book and the page where I first read it, even if it was by now many years ago. That is the beauty of the physical world. It is always there.
As I remove volume after volume from the shelf and place them into the boxes for shipment to the UK, each book reminds me of the time when I read it. It is a highway of my life’s experiences, in a way, paved with paper and ink, and they are friends that I will take with me to the old world, which is now my new world.
We are now rapidly moving into a world in which the printed word will soon vanish. In the United States more than 2,000 local newspapers have closed in the past decade. More are to follow. They have been replaced with a new digital age, in which everything is made of arranged electrons neatly arranged on a screen — whether in for text or images video. Long strings of zeros and ones. Of course, this is both cheaper to produce and vastly less expensive to distribute; easier to manipulate than ink on paper. But there is a price to pay for all things. As Clarence Darrow said in his closing remarks on the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee in 1925 while addressing the subject of teaching evolution in schools– “You sir, may conquer the air, but the birds will lose their wonder, and the clouds will stink of gasoline.”
We may replace the printed word with digital zeroes and ones, and the book that John Adams always carried in his pocket with an iPhone, but to my mind something fundamental is lost in this rather radical transformation of society.
For many years, when I was young, I worked as a dig photographer on archaeological excavations in the Middle East. You would start with a Tel, a mound of earth, much like the mound that covered the famous ship at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, but in this case, the mounds covered long buried towns and cities. Good archaeology is destructive. It is the process of removing layer after layer of history, and so you would go through the present to the Crusaders, deeper still to the Islamic to the Roman to the Greeks and so on.
What we exhumed, for the most part was the detritus of a city that had been sacked or abandoned; the inhabitants taking the good stuff with them when they fled or losing it to the waves of invaders — mostly broken bits of pottery. You can tell a lot from the pottery shards. But once, I found one that had writing on it. These are called ostraca. They are rare but not unknown.
It is an almost religious moment to sit a few meters down in the middle of what was once a vibrant Roman street and touch the writing that someone placed on a piece of pottery two thousand years ago. It is a direct and physical bridge to the past; a powerful almost personal connection between you and the long-dead writer.
Two thousand years from now, if some archaeologist uncovers the remnants of our own age, there will be, if trends continue, precious little for them to find. All our words and images, all our dreams and thoughts, recorded in long strings of zeros and ones will have migrated to space — random electrons in a random world. Lost forever.
And so, I am bringing my books. Old friends, as John Adams would have said, to the new world. There; god willing, I shall continue discovering the subtleties of English life, manual gear changing and the untold terrors of navigating Derby’s Pentagon Island from the passenger seat.
