Over the next 10 years, I thought often about Mr. Criche’s six words. Whenever I felt discouraged, and this was often, it was those six words that came back to me and gave me strength. When a few instructors in college gently and not-so-gently tried to tell me I had no talent, I held Mr. Criche’s words before me like a shield.

I had a couple of really amazing teachers in high school too, and they made that four-year slough of despond not just bearable but occasionally even fun — and, in retrospect, kind of inspiring. I’m thinking about Mrs Page, whose AP English class injected Faulkner into my life; Mr Hood, who didn’t teach history so much as perform it, bring it bodily into that cheerless antiseptic classroom; Mr Lewis, a part-time actor who injected thespian flare into everything he did.

And most of all Mr Swift, who taught creative writing and ran the literary magazine and is, second only to my dad, a lot of the reason I’m still writing today.

Sadly, I don’t have a whole lot of specific memories of my time with Mr Swift — my brain is sort of an anti-sponge that way. But I do remember his bemused half-smile, and the way he delivered criticism — gently, in a way calculated to instruct rather than sting — and, most of all, his careful treatment of the overheated, “experimental” love story I submitted to the literary magazine in my junior year.

It was called Ladyfair, and it was garbage, bad enough to remain reliably mortifying a quarter century later. I remember handing it in to him, and waiting for his reaction — and not getting one. He just let it pass: without praise, thank god, but also without the scorn it so richly deserved. I can only guess at his motives, but I really think he was being careful not to bury my enthusiasm under the loam of it’s early mistakes. He thought there might be better things coming, and was wise (and kind) enough to nurture the good and ignore the awful.

We’re all clay when we’re young, and even people who aren’t responsible for molding us can screw us up pretty easily. When someone like Mr Swift, this guy who we weren’t related to, who we couldn’t really do anything for, who wasn’t contractually required to do anything more than yammer at us for 45 minutes every day and grade our papers and then move on to the next batch of disaffected wastrels — when people like that don’t just not fuck you up, but actually bend over backwards to help you become better than you otherwise would have been — I mean, I don’t believe in miracles, but I think that’s kind of miraculous.

It’s sad that we live in era that’s turning steadily against its teachers. Many states are mandating lockstop curricula geared less toward educating (much less inspiring) than they are toward getting you through standardized tests. Eggars, again:

I don’t remember Mr. Criche teaching us how to take standardized tests, but when we took them, we did well. I don’t remember Mr. Criche gearing his lesson plans toward any state-regulated curricula, but we did pretty well on any and every scale. Why? Because he made us curious. He was curious, so we were curious. He was hungry for learning, so we were hungry, too. He made us want to impress him with the contents of our brains. He taught us how to think and why.

Teachers are getting laid off¹ in staggering numbers these days, and the ones who aren’t are enduring assaults on their already meager salaries and benefits. This is, in a word, insane. Even if the profession wasn’t filled with people who routinely go over and above the call of duty, it would still be one kazillion times more useful to society than the smug billionares who sit atop the income pyramid, busily trading and grifting and greasing palms and adding nothing to anyone’s lives except their own.

But education is filled with those kind of people. Matt Damon made this point, forcefully, at the SOS Teachers March in July:

A teacher wants to teach. I mean, why else would you take a shitty salary, and really long hours, and do that job, unless you really loved to do it?

Look, there’s no need to scour the world for weeping statues or messiah-shaped coffee stains or sane Tea Party candidates: there’s a miracle happening every day in every school in every state in the country. We take that for granted — I certainly did — but it’s a gift that we appear to be busily destroying.

I’ve always loved bookstores: I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time in them, ever since I was a very small person. The first one I remember was called Four Steps Down, on Hamra street, in Beirut. I remember it with startling clarity: the eponymous four steps down to the glass storefront, the beautiful rows of Tin Tin near the door, the colorful piles of books on their display stands, and — farther back, in the darker, quieter reaches of the store — the shelves: hundreds of volumes with tiny close-spaced text and no pictures, massed to the ceiling. I cared less for this area but still loved to wander through it, for reasons that I didn’t fully understand.

Thirty years later, I still don’t. I’d like to say it was some instinctive respect for the corpus of human knowledge as represented by this temple of the written blah blah blah, but it wasn’t — and isn’t — that at all. It was just the books, as objects. Running my finger across their spines. Picking them up. The heft of them; the way they looked, pressed together in their rows; the smell, both musty and new, rising from the bindings when you cracked them open; the soft whisper of pages fluttering against one another.

I’m typing this in Politics and Prose. Yesterday I hung out in Kramerbooks. I’ll probably stop by my local Borders on the way home. This, for me, is a reliable sort of happiness: the kind that you know where it is, an actual physical, visitable place that’ll consistently deliver the goods.

So it’s with some serious, if conflicted, sadness that I watch the era of the paper book wither away. The eBook industry — and, more generally, the internet — and, more generally than that, the emancipation of data from its physical constraints — is barreling toward the printed page like some oblivious dreadnaught, guns chambered, blithely flattening everything in its path.

As soon as you lay your hands on, say, a Nook — this tiny device into which you can easily fit the contents of every book you own, and then every book you’ve ever read, and much, much more — you can feel the death of the printed page, staring up at you from its tiny, unassuming screen. Once you actually use one of these things, it becomes completely obvious that dead-tree books have run their course. It’s not just the breathtaking, bag-of-holding miracle of having all your reading material stuffed into a device about the size of a grade-school primer — it’s the convenience of having all that stuff at your fingertips, the ease of buying new books, the shelf-space you save, the trees you don’t have to pulp, the instant, searchable, bookmarkable access to every word you’ve ever read. It’s not a fair fight. It’s not even close.

But — the minute I step into a bookstore, all those real and obvious and inarguable advantages evanesce, more or less instantly. My forebrain may be convinced of the superiority of eBooks, but the rest of me — the part that doesn’t respond to reason, that’s guided by the much more powerful edicts of memory and nostalgia and emotion — knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that there will never be anything as good as a book made of paper. This is the same part of my brain that sends out sharp bolts of pleasure when I turn a corner and come unexpectedly on a whole shelf of, say, Philip K Dick novels, or an omnibus edition of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or a new printing of The Sound and the Fury. I just don’t get that feeling when I type “Philip K Dick” in a search field at Amazon, and then click bloodlessly through six pages of results.

I realize that this makes me a member of the old guard, and that everything I’m saying isn’t just incomprehensible, but possibly even slightly contemptible, to any whippersnappers who’ve grown up on a steady diet of world wide web, and have never been more than a few iPhone-taps away from getting any information they want, whenever the want it.¹

And really, the emancipation of data from the physical world isn’t an unqualified win. There are consequences, both manifest and obscure, to unleashing the entire corpus of human knowledge on our meat-locked brains. Patton Oswalt writes about one of the more subtle aspects of this, the death of traditional nerdery:

When everyone has easy access to their favorite diversions and every diversion comes with a rabbit hole’s worth of extra features and deleted scenes and hidden hacks to tumble down and never emerge from, then we’re all just adding to an ever-swelling, soon-to-erupt volcano of trivia, re-contextualized and forever rebooted. We’re on the brink of Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was Available Forever.

I know it sounds great, but there’s a danger: Everything we have today that’s cool comes from someone wanting more of something they loved in the past. Action figures, videogames, superhero movies, iPods: All are continuations of a love that wanted more. Ever see action figures from the ’70s, each with that same generic Anson Williams body and one-piece costume with the big clumsy snap on the back? Or played Atari’s Adventure, found the secret room, and thought, that’s it? Can we all admit the final battle in Superman II looks like a local commercial for a personal-injury attorney? And how many people had their cassette of the Repo Man soundtrack eaten by a Walkman?

This is one of the consequences of the end of scarcity. A lot of the satisfaction that geeks squeeze out of the world used to derive from rarity — from the baroque difficulty of, say, obtaining and building an Altair 8800 in 1975. There weren’t many people doing this kind of thing, but, reading any account of that era, you can feel the joy these select few drew from the experience.

But it’s not just geeks — there’s something more satisfying about a hard-won achievement, no matter who you are, and there are consequences to the dissolution of barriers. Our entire economic system, for instance, is predicated on the scarcity of units of capital — whether the scarcity is real (gold coins) or artificial (dollar bills). There are authentic, material advantages to making it hard to get stuff.

I’m not talking about the real world here, though — this is something much mushier and ill-defined: the universe of information. There’s very little data in the world that someone with a computer and an internet connection can’t acquire eventually, and probably immediately. This seems obvious to us now, but really it’s a very new development.

Case in point: pre-internet, computer magazines used to publish games in the form of source code, which my brother and I would painstakingly type into my Atari 800XL. Pages and pages of BASIC rife with incomprehensible PEEKs and POKEs, DATA statements followed by strings of numbers that made no sense to either of us. And if you mistyped just one character in that wilderness of close-spaced text, the program wouldn’t work, and all your hours of monkish transcription would be for naught.

But — you couldn’t go buy these games in stores, and the magazines hadn’t yet started shipping disks. You couldn’t download the source off the internet, because there was no internet. You had two choices: type that shit in, or don’t play the game. It was a drag, and it was frustrating, and it sucked.

Then again, I can barely remember any of the games I’ve downloaded in the past couple of years, and I’m pretty sure I’ve played and then discarded them all in the space of an hour. But I do remember those old Atari BASIC games. Even the ones we couldn’t quite get working. I remember the breathless possibility of them.

Another case in point: there was a writer for Analog — one of these old Atari magazines — whose prose I greatly admired. All these games-you-had-to-type-in had little blurbs describing their “plot”, and the world in which they moved, to give some context to the blocky 8-bit graphics stuttering across the screen. They were generally poorly written throwaway space-fillers, but this guy always managed to make them cool, well-written, and interesting. So I wrote him a letter to tell him how much I loved his stuff.

Let me pause here and explain, for the benefit of my younger readers, what I mean by “letter”. There was once a time, before the end of the Cold War, before email and instant messaging and Facebook statuses, when, if you wanted to write things for other people to read, and they didn’t sit very close to you, you had to send them a letter. This meant writing words on one or more pieces of paper and putting them in an “envelope”, writing an address on the front of the envelope and sticking a “stamp” on it and then walking around until you found a stumpy blue R2-D2-shaped thing called a “mailbox”. You’d open the mouth of the mailbox, and put your envelope inside. And then you’d walk away, placing your faith in an invisible system of conveyance that would, by dint of a bucket-line of human-mediated stages, transport your letter to its destination.²

Amazingly, this worked far more often than it didn’t, but it worked at a ridiculously glacial pace. You can literally upload the entire contents of the library of congress to your blog in the time it took for your letter to get where it was going, and still have enough time to write the first version of Facebook.

Anyway. I was amazed and overjoyed to get an actual response, some time later, via this same creaky paper-based mechanism — thanking me for the compliment, and even writing a couple of sentences about the satisfaction a writer feels when someone unexpectedly says nice things about his work.

I pinned that letter to my corkboard, where it stayed until I left for college. I can’t remember what color socks I’m wearing on any given day, or what I ate for lunch this afternoon, or anything I was doing at work before this long vacation started — but I have an incredibly clear image of that letter, hanging under its red pushpin, in my old room.

I’m not trying to make an argument for the return of scarcity and difficulty and delay here. That genie’s out of the bottle, and there’s no putting it back. And even if you could, I wouldn’t want to — nostalgia-tinged emotional satisfaction aside, I love the fact that I can IM my brother whenever I want to talk to him, no matter where he is. It’s time for us to move beyond physical constraints, with all their limitations, inconveniences, and dangers.

Dangers? Yes. I came across an article in the New Yorker ³ recently, about the Vatican’s efforts to modernize its venerable library. The Vatican Library is an incomprehensibly rare and valuable treasure, a storehouse of human knowledge going back thousands of years, but all its data are trapped inside of books and scrolls and incunabula, one fire or flood or careless archivist away from being lost forever.

The Vatican is embarking on an effort to digitize its entire catalog, bringing its priceless archives to the masses — but, perhaps as important, allowing it to slip its shackles and flee into infospace⁴, where it can be endlessly shared and replicated. Where it can be safe. Ubiquity is a far more effective sentry than any locked and guarded and fireproof vault could ever be.

What this will also do, however, is convert all of these physical documents from storehouses of knowledge into artifacts — still precious, of course, but no longer valuable for their contents as much as for their historical significance. They’ll become monuments to a bygone era, and totems of a time when our knowledge was at the mercy of its terrestrial media.

David Mendelsohn, the article’s author, felt this transition firsthand when he visited the Vatican library and asked to see Procopius’s “Secret History” — a very old document that chronicles the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of Justinian’s court, and serves as a counterpoint to the largely laudatory press that Byzantine emperor received in his day. It was literally the only document of its kind.

So it can be an emotional experience to hold in your hand something like Alamanni’s copy of Procopius, which for a thousand years was the only object in the world that prevented a big chunk of history — a fragile but crucial truth — from being lost. I sat quietly with the text, thinking of how many hands it had to pass through to reach the Vatican Library, how overwhelming the odds had been against its survival into the digitized present, with its heady promise of infinite availability in time and space.

Assuming that we manage to make it into the future without blowing ourselves up or killing the planet, we can look forward to a world where everything we know and ever knew is universally available, replicated on a grand and staggering scale. Yes, the weight of all that information could crush us — but that’s a filtering problem, and one that we will presumably solve, eventually.

All of this is great for us, but not so great for physical books. I mean, they’re not going to simply disappear, any more than the British Empire disappeared when its fortunes failed and it had to draw back into its own borders. Novels will eventually be — in many ways, already are — another emanation of the datasphere, one mechanism among millions for breathing the atmosphere of information in which we live. Paper books will likely remain popular among the people who grew up reading them, but over time, as we die out, the medium will slide inexorably into the outskirts of popular culture, preserved in museums and lining the shelves of hipster antiquarians.⁵

Which makes me very sad. Future generations won’t even have the chance to choose between the efficiency and convenience of eBooks and the subtler, less quantifiable pleasures of walking into a bookstore and losing yourself in its stacks — literally, physically surrounded by fiction and philosophy and history and biography and memoir, the thoughts and deeds and dreams of thousands stamped onto squares of pulp and bound together and shelved: row upon tantalizing row of books that you can touch, and take down, and page through, and hold.

Now — one thing I like to do when Mom gives me this kind of god-like control is change her desktop image to a picture of Hillary Clinton, who she loathes with the heat of a billion suns. Sometimes I use Nancy Pelosi, but for maximum impact you’ve got to go with Hillary.

So that was naturally my first order of business, after Mom granted me access and went off to do some paperwork. I also did a little gleeful cackling, and a lot of detailed, Bond-villanesque explaining of my evil plans — to my wife, in this case, who happened to be nearby, ignoring me (as is right and proper when I get into cackling exposition mode).

Anyway — there I was, chortling maniacally, searching Google for just the right Hillary portrait, when the phone rings. It’s Mom. I say: “Hi Mom!” She says: “I can hear you.”

Because I’d forgotten about the “chat” portion of the screensharing-and-chat thing, of course. I’d muted my end of it, but Mom hadn’t. She’d been listening the whole time.

My first impulse was to lie, but that wouldn’t have done me much good — because my cacklings had also drawn her back to her desk, where she’d been watching me look for Hillary pictures. On her computer.

My second impulse was to collapse into more or less uncontrollable laughter, which is what I did. I’m laughing still.

Teller and I have been brutal to Christians, and their response shows that they’re good fucking Americans who believe in freedom of speech. We attack them all the time, and we still get letters that say, “We appreciate your passion. Sincerely yours, in Christ.” Christians come to our show at the Rio and give us Bibles all the time. They’re incredibly kind to us. Sure, there are a couple of them who live in garages, give themselves titles and send out death threats to me and Bill Maher and Trey Parker. But the vast majority are polite, open-minded people, and I respect them for that.

I spend my fair share of time saying things about Christianity that would have gotten me killed, in interesting and horrific ways, back in the 18th century. I don’t say this enough, but I’m profoundly grateful to live in a place and a time where I don’t have to die for stating my opinion.

Taken together, the operating system and BASIC gave you everything you needed to write and run your own little programs. But the computer contained no word processor, no bells and whistles, no array of applications waiting for you to play with them, no instant pleasurable pay-off for buying a new computer. When you turned on the Atom or the BBC Micro, the ROM chip booted up its two pieces of cargo and on your television screen appeared this:

BASIC >

and nothing else. The machine did nothing else, unless you made it.

My first computer, an Atari 800XL, was a more powerful machine than the Acorn, but not much more powerful. And it greeted you with exactly the same spartan prompt when you turned it on — although it said Ready, instead of BASIC, which was just as cryptic but maybe a little friendlier.

But it didn’t matter. At all. That computer was the most amazing thing I’d ever owned, and I spend hours exploring the simultaneously narrow and infinite possibilities it offered. At one point, before I got an actual word processor (the First XLEnt Word Processor, to be precise) I just typed out documents on that empty white-on-blue prompt screen, laboriously formatting everything so that it fit. There was no way of saving what I’d written, or printing it, or doing anything at all with it except watching it all disappear when I turned the computer off.

It didn’t matter. It was — and is — one of the most thrilling things I’d ever done. My long career with computers has been, in some sense, an effort to recapture that breathless sense of wonder and possibility.

This wasn’t a new revelation, of course. My body and and I have had several conversations along these lines over the past couple of months. They usually go something like this:

Anyway. I think I’m finally realizing that something has to change, because I went to the supermarket on Saturday, and, instead of blowing by produce on my way to starch & sugar, stopped and picked up several severely unappetizing-looking items — spinach and pears and carrots and the like. And, more than that, I went home and made a good-faith effort to actually eat them. This may not sound like progress to normal people, but it’s a minor revolution for me.

But we’ll see. I’m already experiencing taquito withdrawal.

But the column is really about Steve Jobs, of course, his mind and his methods, as all such columns must be:

Steve Jobs believes the key to his success is in finding, hiring, retaining, then firing the best talent in the world. He would maintain in the very moment he’s firing Fadell that Tony is better at his job than anyone else on Earth. Yet still Fadell must go and that’s because – ego issues aside – Jobs had to make room in his inner circle for Papermaster.

Everyone close to Jobs is under continual analysis: is this person really (or still) the best in the world? If they aren’t, or if someone else is just as good but more important for some additional reason, then the incumbent has to go. Steve Jobs ultimately betrays all of his direct reports in this manner. It’s just the way he is. And if it costs Apple a few million to remove one extra head from the room, well that’s okay with a board that KNOWS (as we all do, to put it fairly) that Jobs really is the secret of Apple’s success. His system may be brutal, but it works.

There’s a reason why I call Lord Jobs Lord Jobs. It’s not just my helpless, quasi-spiritual devotion to the stuff he makes, and to the aesthetic that informs it; it’s also because, in many ways, he’s as temperamental, maddening, inspiring, contradictory, bullheaded, and ultimately indomitable as any god you’re likely to encounter.

Mostly when people go to temples to worship their gods, they focus — to their great credit — on the positive: all the reanimated corpses and entreaties for the poor and wine/water transmogrifications and drowned centurions. But, really, the holy books they’re reading from are mostly about power, and the horrible things that will happen to you if you fuck with that power. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, and — if you’ve really pissed Him off — He planteth a foot in your ass and sends you tumbling down to your eternal punishment.

I’m sure Lord Jobs is a very nice person when he’s not plotting world domination from his seat in Cupertino. And I’m equally sure he’d balk at actually sending people to hell. But he will crush you utterly if you get in his way, and not really think twice about it. There is Lord Jobs, there is the goal of Lord Jobs, and there is the straight line of scorched earth between the two. Nothing else.

I mailed my iPhone out to a company in Kansas for repair yesterday, because it won’t sync with my computer anymore. What I should have done is take it to the Apple Store and get a free replacement, but I can’t do that because my phone is unlocked. My phone is unlocked for very good reasons. Nevertheless: Lord Jobs has decreed that filth like me, who stray from the Divine Path, will not share in any of its blessings. Even if I paid full price for those blessings. Even if those blessings aren’t blessings at all, actually, but contractual obligations. No matter. I am a heretic, and as a heretic my presence in an Apple Store is frowned upon, and my entreaties mocked and reviled.

And so I’ve been shaking my tiny fist in the general direction of Cupertino ever since my lovely phone gave up the ghost. But it’s a lackluster, good-natured fist shaking — and when, Jobs-willing, I exchange many hard-earned dollars for a working iPhone, I will go back to using it — and loving it — slavishly. And worshiping dyspeptically, reluctantly, tiny-fist-shakingly, at the feet of its creator.

Such is the power of the Lord.

All hail Lord Jobs. Damn it.

Update: Gruber corroborates Cringley’s basic point, but cast aspersions on most of his interpretations.

Which is a sort of roundabout way of saying that I got a package from her last week, and the package contained this:

It looks even better in person. I keep opening it and closing it and turning it over and marveling that something so lovely and one-of-a-kind is actually in my house, much less my possession. I can’t even imagine defiling it with actual writing.

Kater put together a diary about its construction, here. You can see more of her stuff here.

Although “row” turned out to be kind a misnomer. The river was in a shallow mood, and the flow of water often petered out into tiny ponds surrounded by narrow shores of gravel. When this happened, our guide would use his oar as a lever, dragging us over drifts and sandbars with a lovely combination of finesse and brute strength. Sometimes he asked us to get out and help him push. Other times we disembarked and walked along the gravelbed, while he dragged the boat along whatever circuitous route the anemic waterway was wandering.

After we got past the shallows, we floated down the river in the traditional way: athwart the current, our boat perpendicular to the shore, Victor using his oar as a rudder rather than a propellant, navigating us around deadfalls and through rapids and down narrow corridors of silt and rock. We’d come to see eagles, and they were everywhere — walking along the dry surface of the lake and perched in the naked branches of dying trees and flying overhead. So many, in fact, that they sort of became a commonplace, and my attention turned to the landscape: the scale of it, the quiet, boundless power. Long flat planes of water hemmed in by green walls of trees. Eagles soaring overhead. It takes your breath away, and makes you feel insignificant and exalted at the same time.

Now: I am, above all things, a soft and foppish creature of the suburbs. My basic attitude toward the natural world is fairly straightforward: it must be avoided, at all costs, because everything in it wants to kill me, as quickly and savagely as possible. I distrust the strange realm on the other side of my office window, with its bugs and its strange unpredictable temperatures and its ugly tendency to spit water from the sky.

Nevertheless — this trip was a complete and utter blast. I’m not at one with nature or anything, but for those two hours on the river me and nature were more or less on speaking terms, for the first time in a long time. I understand now, a little, what makes people fall in love with this murderous, ubiquitous, beautiful everywhere.