G.R. writes:

This essay by Fabrice Hadjadj in Humanum reminded me of you. It’s titled “Rediscovering the “Language of Wood”: Why Can’t We Just Substitute ‘Be Fruitful and Multiply’ with ‘Connect and Download?’”

Here is an excerpt:

Some might think that there is no difference between the library of Trinity College and a database. One might argue that the database is more useful, because it can be carried in a pocket on a USB stick or on an external hard drive. But can you live in an external hard drive? With the library, there is the large park outside, the useless vastness of the halls and of the large windows, the humble solemnity of the slabs of rock which hold the memory of the forests, the hammered leather of the bindings which preserve the memory of the animals, and the physical closeness of the teacher, the physical closeness of that fellow-student or of that pretty co-ed we don’t know; and then the pen, the ink, the heavy paper which forces us not to waste and on which we cannot write just anything: all things which don’t serve us in our work, which don’t provide information for our topic of research, but which sustain us in our presence to the world, and which remind us of the generous density of existence.

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