{"id":63805,"date":"2013-12-17T13:30:54","date_gmt":"2013-12-17T18:30:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=63805"},"modified":"2013-12-17T13:12:04","modified_gmt":"2013-12-17T18:12:04","slug":"thoreau-and-the-ipad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/12\/17\/thoreau-and-the-ipad\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoreau and the iPad"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Photo_1.480x480-75\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Recently I took my iPad to a park across a lake, sat under a tree facing the water, and started reading the e-book version of Walden<\/i>, Henry David Thoreau\u2019s classic avowal of the possibility of, as well as the necessity for, simplicity amid modern life\u2019s profusion and superfluity. Cognitive dissonance doesn\u2019t get much more dissonant than this.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur inventions are wont to be pretty toys \u2026 improved means to an unimproved end,\u201d wrote the handyman sage in the book\u2019s first chapter, titled \u201cEconomy.\u201d Few toys are prettier than the iPad, and its prettiness is by no means a feat of economy. Its minimalism, for one, belies the complexity of thought that went into its design, while its ease of use obscures the intricacy of the industry behind its manufacture. That there\u2019s nothing new and improved about its ends should be evident from the resemblance between the categories of apps in the App Store and those of stores listed on the touchscreen directory at the entrance of shopping malls\u2014that harried shopper\u2019s guide to the nonvirtual versions of apps for games, books, sports, lifestyle, and even social networking. Or especially social networking, come to think of it, when you consider that the din from the food court or the theater lobby is nothing more than the noise from so many short messages being broadcast on an unmetered network with unlimited bandwidth.<\/p>\n

But what does it matter if my iPad is merely a prettier means to pedestrian ends that are, in Thoreau\u2019s words, \u201calready but too easy to arrive at\u201d? Does that make it one more toy to be transcended or tucked out of sight when meditating on sufficiency? I also own a paperback edition of Walden<\/i>, its pages worn yellow with age and marred with the fervent notes of my much younger self. It has none of the iPad\u2019s high-precision electronics; the letter m<\/i> is smudged in several places, and yet it\u2019s lost none of its functionality. And apart from enlightenment, it has only one other app, as a paperweight. Is this nonmultitasking relic the authentic medium for the all-in-one manifesto and proof-of-concept of the uncluttered life? <\/p>\n

Thoreau would presumably have thought so. Although he did not list books among the necessities of life, he ranked them highly enough, next to the knife and the wheelbarrow, in fact, as one of the few articles that can be obtained at such little cost that they can be brought along on any wilderness retreat without disrupting its sense of freedom from urban encumbrance. If simplicity were a mere matter of thrift, then my copy of Walden<\/i>, bought for the price of a tall latte, and certainly cheaper than a wheelbarrow, is indeed more fitting than my iPad as a companion on a furlough from the copious cares of networked living.<\/p>\n

And that is exactly where these deliberations would have ended if my love of gadgets had capitulated to the logic of tools and coffee. But I\u2019m the kind of person that Thoreau\u2019s friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson had in mind when he wrote of creatures of a given temperament who \u201cresist the conclusion in the morning, but adopt it as the evening wears on.\u201d I made some hasty conclusions about the iPad\u2019s worth when I decided to buy one, and my conscience demands that the facts fit them.<\/p>\n

The facts, as I\u2019ve culled them, don\u2019t come any fitter. My paperback copy of Walden<\/i> is not just a vehicle for transcendental philosophy: it is also the result of a tightly orchestrated chain of industrial events spanning the globe\u2014from the cultivation of trees and their distillation into pulp, to the pressing of ink to paper by machines run by arrays of circuit boards not too different from those found on the assembly lines of electronic gadgets like, um, the iPad. It is, like the rest of its log-begotten kind, the product of a world of toil no less taxing than Thoreau\u2019s favorite spiritless enterprise, the laying of railroad tracks in nineteenth-century America.<\/p>\n

\"Walden_Thoreau\"<\/a>I will be generous here and not make much of the toll that book publishing exacts on the environment, except to observe the irony of contemplating the grace of life in the woods by reading Walden<\/i> in its pulp form. What to me is a darker stain on the moral prestige of books in general and their right as bearers of transcendentalist doctrine in particular is their thick ledger of human resource. The million Irishmen who Thoreau posited as asking, \u201cIs not this railroad which we have built a good thing?\u201d have been replaced by a truly multicultural mix of people tending pulpwood in far-flung countries with varied climates and literary tastes. If these people were to look up from the furrows they\u2019ve made in the ground to ask if this book they\u2019re building is a good thing, the avid reader of Thoreau would be tempted to dole out his original response: \u201cYes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse, but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same innuendos can be made about my iPad, of course, with the Chinese factory worker standing in for the Irish tracklayer or the Brazilian logger. In fact, just about any modern product is susceptible to such insinuations, which could be made against pretty much anything produced in factories or farms manned by people whose waking hours could be better spent on non\u2013product-related pursuits. Thoreau conceded as much. \u201cIt certainly is better,\u201d he wrote, \u201cto accept the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and industry of mankind offer.\u201d It was a hard pill to swallow, and one can almost hear him struggling to regurgitate it as he built his cabin, singing<\/p>\n

\n

Men say they know many things;
But lo! they have taken wings \u2013
The arts and sciences,
And a thousand appliances;
The wind that blows
Is all that any body knows.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But swallow it he did, and we have, as a result, one of the most eloquent examples of specious exposition ever set to prose\u2014a demonstration of the Spartan life corroborated with the records of goods he\u2019d acquired dirt cheap from people whose un-Spartan lifestyles often made such trade the exigent means of supporting their own extraneous pursuits and acquisitions. Thoreau\u2019s retreat was, remarked the late John Updike, a luxury \u201cfinanced by the surplus that an interwoven, slave-driving economy generates.\u201d<\/p>\n

My iPad is arguably the epitome of such luxury, one subsidized besides by a surplus of able minds and bodies from the world\u2019s most populous assembly-line job agency. By all accounts, Thoreau, a Harvard graduate who used his own money to publish his first book, belonged to the class of people who, though not rock-star rich, could well afford such frill. If he had somehow been transplanted into our own time, perhaps by some mischievous time traveler out to show him that his admonitions have gone largely unheeded, his attention would undoubtedly be drawn to the iPad as one of the many unimproved means he can purchase with the money he\u2019s sure to make simply by selling facsimiles of his journals and manuscripts. If I could play one role in this fantasy, I\u2019d write myself in as the Apple store clerk faced with the formidable task of showing him the iPad and explaining exactly what the device is good for.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d have to tread carefully, of course, for here is the man who called it his greatest skill to want but little and whose writings exhorted me and other aspiring drifters in our youths to keep our accounts on our thumbnails even as we spent our parents\u2019 money. I\u2019d start by telling him that the iPad serves different ends for different people, but a person of his inclination will find in it a journal and a portable library. A quick scribble on the notepad app and a skim through the digital version of works by Montaigne, Voltaire, and his own spiritual kin, Walt Whitman, should make for more than ample exhibits. Then, just as his eyes start to glaze over, I\u2019d draw his attention to the iPad\u2019s unique advantage as the literary implement of choice to take along on a retreat to a secluded, electricity-deprived cabin\u2014that advantage being its transient and virtually ephemeral battery life.<\/p>\n

To understand this, one must first remember that Thoreau\u2019s sojourn at Walden was by no means a withdrawal from society, a point he made clear by recounting some of his nearly daily strolls to town and conversations with the friends he made and often sought in the neighborhood of his cabin. Nor was it an abstinence from technology as it stood during his time. One of his first acts at Walden was to avail himself of a modest yet enduring piece of technology, one that felled entire forests long before the chainsaw: the ax. And despite his dismissal of news as gossip read by \u201cold women over their tea,\u201d he wasn\u2019t above perusing the newspaper that served as wrapping for his dinner. If anything, Thoreau proved Spinoza\u2019s axiom that \u201cwe can never bring it about that we need nothing outside ourselves for preservation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Temperance, not abnegation, therefore, is the real lesson, partly written and largely mimed, of the sermon that is Walden<\/i>. The transcendentalist in the woods needs his journal and his books\u2014they preserve his humanity no less than clothing or shelter\u2014but they, too, need to be reined in. And what better rein on bookishness than the iPad\u2019s battery, which lets him read and write only so much and then no more. No more, that is, until his next trip to town, where he can charge it as he eats his dinner, perhaps while browsing the news over a cup of tea. The roughly three hours it takes to restore it to full charge should give him enough time, moreover, to check in with a friend or, if he can find a safe place to leave it, wander through the shops or even see a movie. Enough time, in other words, to reconnect, in both the old and the new sense of the word.<\/p>\n

The iPad\u2019s battery meter itself has a significance that Thoreau, a born bookkeeper, should find especially apt. When the device is removed from a power source, the meter becomes a virtual tally, crude yet irrefutable, of its owner\u2019s outlay of attention, that most profitable and most squandered of capitals. One full charge on the iPad is worth about ten hours of use as an e-book reader or a journal, but someone with more eclectic interests can go for days without recharging. Longer, even, if he takes short fasts from all literary work, as Thoreau did one summer, when he spent whole mornings sitting still, \u201crapt in a reverie,\u201d unable or unwilling to \u201csacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands.\u201d Walden<\/i>\u2019s revelations may well have been the harvests of those mornings, and the iPad-toting Thoreauvian should be mindful that every tick of its battery is so many minutes spent on what may be mere preparation for, if not diversion from, such moments.<\/p>\n

A century and a half after Thoreau\u2019s death, Walden<\/i> has become, like Thoreau\u2019s beloved classics, a \u201ctreasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations.\u201d It is also poised, well into the e-book era, to outlive its original medium. If our fantasies come to fruition, someday we\u2019ll be transmitting it directly into our brains, to be recalled rather than read, like a gospel learned by heart. It will no doubt outlast the iPad, too, and its many inevitable iterations, shedding them one after the other, like so much outdated apparel. In this succession of hosts, each device in its turn will carry Thoreau\u2019s words with little loss of resonance, for their prescription of discipline and moderation is, fortunately enough, compatible with technology in all of its incompatible variety.<\/p>\n

Dannie Zarate lives in Australia with his wife and is an ardent student of the Indonesian culinary arts.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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