This is an essay I have wanted to write for at least 2 years. Instead of working on it slowly, and researching it, and adding texture to it, and maybe finding a publication I could submit it to, I am following my current approach of writing whatever I can, whenever I can*. Done is better than perfect, right? [a masterclass in the Apologetics of Mediocrity*]
Anyway! Anyway.
Ages ago I stumbled across the phrase ‘flamboyantly analogue’ (which I can no longer find the link to, but I think it first occurred in the New York Times), and I immediately wrote it down. I don’t have a Kindle, I don’t have an iPad, I don’t have a digital signature (much to the chagrin of my husband).
None of this was deliberate, it just never occurred to me to get them. But I did start noticing, once I had had kids, how much technology invisibilises the social life of Things.
I am a tactile person, I am a trinket person, I am a nostalgic person; and maybe all these things made me more alert to how much of what was incidental learning and discovery in my childhood now has become something I need to know what to look for in order to find it. This severely curtails the joy of happenstance.
I sat down and flipped through my phone applications and tried to think of the equivalent objects when I was growing up.
Instead of an online diary we had a freebie Old Mutual month planner next to the phone where all important dates and meetings and birthdays were recorded. There was the family phone book, slowly filled up over the years with people’s numbers in different coloured pens and pencils.
And of course there was the telephone. A land-line through which we were acutely in tune with whoever each of us were speaking to, and often what they were speaking about (shame poor teenagers, oh lucky parents).
Instead of iTunes or Spotify where I have to specifically look for music or be guided by an algorithm, I would hunt through my parents’ cassette tape, LP and CD collection. I was guided by the covers; I would skip through things until I found something I liked. My discoveries were obviously determined by what was available, but it was much more organic than the curated search of “Jazz for Cooking” I do these days on my device.
Books were not on screens but on shelves. Familiar objects that located my parents in history. Their selection of books shaping the narrative of what I was to know, but I could pick things up, and put them down. I could see what my parents were reading. These days you have no idea what a person is reading, (not even the person lying in bed next to you if you don’t ask) it could be Tolstoy or Timeslive – holding a device blanks out the social cues that may have led to conversation. Oh, I haven’t read that, is it good? Oh, I really enjoyed that, have you read her other book?
Instead of inputting the ingredients of my fridge into google to spit out possible recipes, I used to page through recipe books. I would marvel at how complicated some were and wonder if some people had absolutely no common sense that they would need a recipe for Eggy Bread.
Even our household finances were material to me. My mother kept her housekeeping money in an envelope in her study drawer. When that envelope was empty, I could plainly see that requests for anything extra would have to wait until the envelope was replenished at the end of the month.
I got a sense of my parents’ upbringing from the photo albums tucked into bookshelves. Who is this, Mom? Where was this, Dad? When were you there?
Time and Getaway magazines were always in the loo – I read what my parents read. I looked at pictures and formed my own opinions. They offered a touchpoint for dinner conversation. Did you see that picture of… That article about… Our relationship to Things fostered a relationship to each other.
Sheet music is now on an iPad, alarm clocks on phones, shopping on apps, filing cabinets in the cloud, encyclopaedias on google. We used to watch the news together and see what the next day’s weather would be. A camera was something that came out on special occasions and holidays. School circulars were handed to children to take home, not put on Whatsapp groups. Jumble sales happened in church halls not on Facebook Marketplace.
The tactile archive through which I came to understand myself and the world has become sadly limited. The act of stumbling onto something has become a romantic fascination for me. Carrying my book around a badge of honour. Secondhand shops the best kind of date with myself.
I’ve wondered how my kids will navigate the world of Things. The move-away from single-function objects to multi-function devices, often means that we can only seek what we think we want to seek. The echo chamber grows ever louder. And if you have no idea what to look for? Then what? A dangerous void to be filled.
What of serendipity and exploration? Of browsing around a shop and realising you didn’t actually want what you thought you wanted, maybe you’ll try something new? Of taking a stranger’s recommendation for a restaurant? Of the page next to the thing you were looking for in the dictionary? Oh, that’s what that word means! I didn’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know. Things, Places, People teach us this, point arrows in all directions, contribute to a life of curiosity.
Rebecca Solnit’s gorgeous book A Field Guide to Getting Lost asks:
“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?"(Plato)
The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration - how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?”
…
And so the call to be ‘flamboyantly analogue’. I want lots of Things in my home. I want clocks, and CDs, and books, and postcards and photo albums and calendars. I’m trying so hard to tell my kids what I am doing on my phone when I use it. “I am reading a message from your teacher about what to bring to school tomorrow”. I want my home to be like a second-hand shop so that I don’t direct my kids’ taste through what the internet thinks is interesting, but rather that they stumble on an old map and ask, ‘where is this?’
…
*Look out for a rebrand (ha!) of my Substack later this week. Out with the angsty solipsism of the old name, in with something more down-to-earth and appropriate.
*This week I met a woman who is a full professor, has more children than I do, and also has an extensive range of interesting extra-curricular hobbies. I immediately felt pathetic in her presence (she was obviously really nice, too), as what I had done that day was have a mid-morning nap to recover from the combination of new early morning drop-offs and a lot of lowkey crying. Can anyone say High Capacity? But when I had gotten over my bout of insecurity, I remembered that I like my life, in fact I am privileged (and dare I say self-possessed?) to reject some of the noise of the world and follow my heart’s longing.
You, Hannah had a rich life growing up where you did. No, I'm not biased!
Graham Greene wrote: "Childhood is the credit balance of the writer".
That being so, you were born rich.