Havre de Grace. -- Since my son went off to college last fall, he has been communicating with his family primarily by e-mail. This makes me feel a little fusty, because I don't know how to do it.
Fortunately, Irna does, and when she comes home in the evening and turns on her computer, a synthesized voice often chirps "you have mail." Then she clicks the little mouse thing at the screen, and the message pops up. Often she prints me out a copy, so that I can read it on paper as though it were a real letter.
It has seemed to me, as a matter of pride if nothing else, that I should be able to participate in this brave new communications world. Not to understand e-mail and the Internet and the mysteries of cyberspace is to feel oneself an anachronism, like one of those old people occasionally profiled in the newspapers who have never flown in an airplane or learned to drive a car.
I don't see myself as an antique, and I'm not completely incompetent technologically. These words were written on a computer I've had for about 10 years, and then sent via computer modem and the telephone to The Sun. Technology has been helpful to me as a writer, so I have reason to appreciate it and respect it.
A few weeks back I even went so far as to go, with a friend I admire, to a giant computer store to look at new computers. For about $1,500 I could have bought a new computer with the capacity, and the software, to allow me to prowl the Internet and communicate electronically with Willy at college -- and with hundreds of other people around the world.
Once I learned how to use it, it would have given me access to incredible amounts of information. But I'm not on-line yet, and am beginning to think that I don't want to be. There may be elements of Luddite technophobia, and even just plain laziness, behind this decision, but that's not all.
There are some powerful intellectual and emotional reasons why I don't care to get wired.
Sven Birkerts expresses some of them brilliantly in "The Gutenberg Elegies, The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age," published last year. Mr. Birkerts is a professor of literature and a parent as well as an essayist. He is also about 10 years younger than I am, which I find comforting, for it means the provocative views expressed in this passionate and deadly-serious book can't simply be dismissed as the anti-modern rantings of an Old Person.
The arrival of the electronic age over the last half-century, Mr. Birkerts believes, can be equated with Gutenberg's invention of movable type in the 15th century, or -- in Greece at around the time of Socrates -- the overtaking of the oral tradition by writing. It's of enormous cultural significance.
"Since World War II we have stepped, collectively, out of an ancient and familiar solitude and into an enormous web of imponderable linkages," he writes.
But now that we are awash in information, which we and our machines can "process," we have neither the time nor the solitude that serious reading -- and the search for wisdom and understanding that it implies -- still demands.
Like hundreds of other bemused teachers, Mr. Birkerts says his college students, even the brightest ones, are dumfounded and put off by, for example, Henry James. They are not, and never have been, readers, so they have difficulty not only with James' vocabulary and syntax, but with his allusions, his ironic tone and his deviations from the straight line of his plot. They hate his writing, though they are unable to explain why.
What this means is that most serious literature, especially fiction and poetry, is being driven out of the general culture and into its scholarly fringes, where it may or may not survive. The postwar generations just haven't the time for it.
Older people, wrote Camille Paglia, "can't understand how we who were born after the war can read and watch TV at the same time. But we can. When I wrote my book I had earphones on, blasting rock music or Puccini and Brahms. The soap operas -- with the sound turned down -- flickered on my TV. I'd be talking on the phone at the same time. Baby boomers have a multilayered, multitrack ability to deal with the world."
Maybe so. But that doesn't mean, as they lead their multitracked lives, that they'll be able to read James, or Conrad, or the poems of Yeats. "The price of retooling for the electronic millennium," says Mr. Birkerts bluntly, "is a sacrifice of the incompatible attitudes required for reading and meditative introspection."
Sven Birkerts can visualize, and so can I, a near future in which we all sit day and night at our keyboards, incessantly stimulated by torrents of new facts, knowing all and understanding nothing. There won't be time to watch the moonrise, listen to the wind, or lose ourselves in difficult books.
No thanks. For a while yet, I'll be staying away from the computer stores and off the Internet, putting my thoughts down on paper, and entrusting my letters to the U.S. Postal Service.
Peter A. Jay is a writer and farmer.