As shown in my previous post, one of my current writing projects depends heavily on digital technology.
My other main project is unbesmirched by digits. I’m assembling a collection of aphoristic thoughts on remembering. They began as reflections in my handwritten journals over the last several years.
I reread my journals and selected entries that I wanted to include in this book. For each entry, I typed a heading on a page, noting on which journal and page the entries appeared.
Now I’m using my old friend, the 1937 Remington Noiseless Model Seven, to turn handwritten journal entries into typewritten text. I revise and rethink as I go.
The typewritten pages get ordered and reordered with the help of paper clips, staples, binder clips, and Post-Its.
Why am I doing things in such an old-fashioned way?
Also, the difference between human and machine memory is one topic I’m writing about, and in order to do justice to human memory it seems appropriate to sink into a purely non-computerized way of recalling and thinking. It helps to turn inwards. (That’s what the German word for memory, Erinnerung, literally means.)
This process is inefficient. These thoughts have collected over years, and gathering them into a book is also taking years. That’s all right. It’s the process of gathering that is most meaningful to me, not the finished product (which maybe no one will want to publish anyway). As I’ve been saying recently, computers will never catch up to humans because they’re not slow enough. Time means nothing to a machine—it’s just a measure of how efficiently it produces its output. But for humans, as Kierkegaard puts it, “the time itself is the task.” I could ask AI to produce a book about memory, and it would spit it out in seconds. Maybe it would even contain text that would be thought-provoking and meaningful to readers—but not to the computer. And not to me.
As the digitization of the world continues to accelerate, I believe seemingly absurd projects like mine will become ever more important. We need moments, spaces, and activities that can’t be reduced to the efficient processing of information.
Genau.