The chair and the Aqua-Lung
This post is part of The Quiet Lane series.
“When we compare something old and something new—like a book and an iPad or a nun sitting next to a texting teenager on a train—we believe that the new thing has more of a future, when in fact the reverse is true. The longer an object or custom has been with us, the greater its staying power. On average, the newest things die out first... There will be tables and chairs in the future, but maybe not plasma screens or cell phones. ”
When Cousteau and Gagnan introduced the Aqua-Lung in 1943, they unlocked a world we barely knew, immediately altering our relationship to the biosphere. Humanity would no longer be trapped along the shorelines, or granted timid, limited access to inscrutable oceans, bound to the surface of lakes and rivers meandering through our lands. We would now inhale below the waterline. We would swim with sea creatures.
Free divers are an inspiring testament to the adaptability of the human body, but we still can't extract O2 trapped in H2O. If you want to survive autonomously in an aquatic environment, SCUBA gear isn't just convenient technology—it's a necessity.
Lately, I find myself questioning the necessity of things.
I read two books recently, back to back, each providing an interesting perspective into one of our most transformative "past" technologies: paper. In Papyrus, Irene Vallejo moves through the history of paper like a fiction writer through a novel. Bouncing around from Ancient Egypt to World War II and the present day, it's a story full of drama, of light as much as darkness. Roland Allen's The Notebook acts almost as Part 2 of that same tale, reviewing its origins but soon picking up with the democratization of paper as we know it today, and what were, in essence, the very first Personal Knowledge Management tools.
What always fascinates me about history is how little we've changed, fundamentally. The pursuits, the worries, the longings, the curiosity... apart from the cultural shock of a foreign environment, human beings could easily be transposed from one era to another. We've always lived, and loved, and hoped. We've always invented and created, contemplated and reflected.
At first, most of humankind's ideas and stories were fleeting, bound to voices and memories as impermanent as the wind. With writing they solidified. And with paper, they became immutable objects capable of travelling through time. The medium, especially in its modern form, revolutionized knowledge, art, and the sciences. It liberated thoughts by allowing any of us to project them onto the world, and into the future. Our words were still fragile, yet suddenly unbound.
But they could also live smaller, more intimate lives.
Dime a dozen…
For most of my teenage and young adult years I was the guy with the pocketbook. I always carried one on me. Nothing fancy either. I'd use any cheap notebook I could find as long as it was the right size. They're pretty banged up but I kept them all, and I recently brought them out of storage for the very first time since we moved into our house. Which means BK... before kids. Diving back into the mind of your teenage self is a surreal, mostly cringe-inducing experience, but it's also as close as you can get to a time machine: some of the pages brought me straight back to those exact moments, down to my surroundings and the people I was with. I recognized the desperate scrawls of heartbreaks. The furious drug-induced sessions full of strikethroughs and do-overs. Song drafts, poems, shopping lists and phone numbers, everything bound to fibre in dark mountainous scratches.
Above: notes, circa 1987.
More importantly, seeing those words unfold reminded me of the process: how I used to think on paper, exclusively; the bits of information I'd store; and the obvious staying power of a physical imprint.
I've gone back and forth with paper several times, mostly within the context of brainstorming or storyboarding specific projects. Now, I own a pocketbook again. It's not an exclusive deal: I still use Things and Bear extensively, or any other app that makes sense. But instead of fumbling with my Apple Watch or iPhone when inspiration strikes, I jot down the idea. It's a significant change from digital input because each entry looks different. My handwriting may be worse than usual on any given day, or bigger/smaller. Maybe I circled or underlined a few words. Maybe I sketched what I had in mind. Those differences, in the end, impact retrieval: when I go over my notes I'm not so much reading as recognizing. The way words are written, their shape, size, nervousness, all add to the comprehension. And yes, I do feel silly talking about this as some sort of great discovery: Look! I bring you... The Wheel!! 👏🙌
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Still, it goes back to what I wrote in the Overture post:
“... along the way, they also hypnotized us into forgetting the world we’d once inhabited.”
Technology remains an empowering tool, but why was I once so incredibly excited by the addition of sketches in Apple Notes? Or by a $200 Pencil that kind-of-feels-like-the-real-thing-but not-quite? We spent decades, it seems, striving to replicate functionalities already available to any child with a sketchbook and a set of crayons. Conveniences sold as the necessities of our new and oh! so shinier world.
I pick up a black Pilot Rolling Ball and I'm not so sure anymore.
Paper might just be the Aqua-Lung.
