This is my Sunday column for the March 18, 2012 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune.
An encyclopedia of change
By Aaron J. BrownChange brings a mighty clatter, but also the echo of what just ended. Those echoes have my attention as our strange northern Minnesota winter drops with a thud into a distractingly gorgeous early spring.
That cracked blue sled is all done, I think. It took its last ride down the sliding hill, wrapped around a tree once or twice sprawling out its human cargo. The snow boat melted. We knew that was going to happen, but still. It’s time to put the graham cracker houses from Christmas out for the squirrels. Those tiny imaginary Christmas people will go nuts! Or rather, the way of nuts.
The lake ice went dark; not long to go. No more walking across to the undeveloped wilderness on the other side, a special day last month recorded and filed. In the past now. No sense clinging. Next year maybe, but we will all be older.
Last week my friend Kelly loaded one of the last actual celluloid-style films into the projector at the Hibbing movie theater. The cinema, like many, is adapting a digital system that allows them to show many of today’s popular movies. As much as it represents progress, Kelly said she felt a little sad and so did I when I heard about it.
Traditional film renders a series of actual photographs in focus, illuminated by hot light. That clattering projector runs 24 frames a seconds, maybe more, producing a magical effect. The new projectors no doubt amaze, but represent an extraordinary effect that no one believes is magic anymore. Digitized ones and zeros lie at the core of the pictures, just as they do for so much of what we see and do. There will be no hiding these films in a vault or in some valise snuck across the iron curtain. They are in “the cloud” where there is both memory and no memory at all.
This past week the Encyclopedia Britannica announced it would be closing its print operations, only publishing its famed encyclopedias in digital form. No one was buying those stacks of thick books; they were too expensive, anyway. $70 for electronic access and you’re off to the races, smaller than Google but undoubtedly fancier.
The news reminded me of the encyclopedia set we had when I was a kid. We lived in a trailer house on the junkyard out in Zim and were actually visited by a travelling salesman peddling encyclopedias. They weren’t Britannica, more like some kind of knockoff. My parents, broke at the time, actually bought a few letter volumes. Not all the letters. We couldn’t swing that all at once. But some.
It was a terrible financial decision, neither the first nor the last but certainly the most intellectual. Because you really can’t put just a few letters of an encyclopedia up on the shelf under the guise that it was for the kids’ school work. You had to complete the set and I could tell even then it was a hardship for my parents, but they did.
Shortly after that the very concept of traveling salesmen went out the door and by the time I was going to college we were using the internet. This set of door-to-door encyclopedias might have been the last ever sold to backward country family with grubby kids in the public education system.
I. Read. Every. Single. Word. I can still feel the dull weight of a volume in my lap, the touch of the faux leather binding, the thin paper I never ripped.
So this is progress, these electrons, and I can’t judge for I deal in much the same slop every day. Indeed, I have prospered. The snow does melt and the sun does shine. Time advances and so do we all, off to what comes next.
But when the spring comes I like to remember the snow. Change will come and I do not fear it. I fear forgetting what came before, for everything moves at the speed of light.
Aaron J. Brown is a writer and community college instructor from the Iron Range. He is the author of the blog MinnesotaBrown.com and the host of the Great Northern Radio Show, next airing Saturday, April 7 on 91.7 KAXE.
I read encylopedias when I was a kid too.
C.O.