Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

To someone who had died in 1965, the industry would now be unrecognizable. The editors and publishers I knew then (some of them, anyway) had fireplaces in their offices. You rode in caged, open elevators from floor to floor, in stone buildings (sometimes). These people, many of whom had been born in the nineteenth century, were not that good at making money, but in the main they were devoted to literature. The financial apparatus was subsidiary to their standards and their calling. Once, I walked across Boston Common and went up to an office overlooking the Granary Burial Ground. I was so young that in the lobby they thought I was the child of someone who worked there, come to meet his parent after school. The editor I went to see was recovering from a very long and high-proof lunch. Her assistant brought a coffee service and cakes, on china. You could hear the clock ticking. “We won’t make any money on this,” she said of my first book, “but it’s so beautiful that I cannot see failing to publish it.”

The Nobel Prize could not have lifted anyone over the Common as buoyantly as I was floated back on my way home, and I had a wonderful week thereafter. But then I returned. It seemed as if she had just been exiled—as indeed she had been—and she told me that she was going to give me some bad news. But as she was not the cause of it, she would summon the cause of it, or, as I now know, merely the agent, to tell me himself. Down he came in the elevator cage, courtly and of the old school, a nuclear-grade preppy, her superior, responsible to the laws of economics and the welfare of his many employees. They would not publish the book, they were sorry, but times were changing, the model was different, the pressures overwhelming.

Nonetheless, in the following decades, in New York, as the companies were rationalized, I looked upon the people of the old school, as they were picked off like coyotes shot from a helicopter, with a rather cold eye. Their ideals had been unable to protect either them or the literature they loved. They knew nothing about economics, systems analysis and integration, marketing, or finance. They hadn’t a clue about the use of the newly emerging small computers. They were inefficient, uneducated in the hard things of the world. My point was that the machine and the machine-like routines, the iron laws, had conquered. To survive, we had to learn to live with them as our elders had not. We would look toward the benefits of rationalization and efficiency, because the hardness of these things could be turned to the good.

The first editor I ever visited, in the early sixties, had a fire going in the fireplace, and wrote with a fountain pen. She received me patiently and gave me an hour. I was sixteen. The last editor that I visited (not my own) received me hurriedly in a tiny cubicle with a window that did not open. I had the impression that she was forced to look for books that, above all, would be able to run the gauntlet and stay on the shelves long enough to keep her alive in her job. She was very irritated that her work had been disrupted that day as her computer was seized by hundreds of pop-up ads for penis enlargement. As she pointed out with justified irritation, “I don’t even have a penis.” Sic transit gloria mundi.

My confession is not that I stood on the wrong—though winning—side back then, and not that I was unmoved by the destruction, and that I rationalized it away. Rather, my real sin was that as I formed, confirmed, and spoke my opinions I heard an inner voice that told me I was wrong. I knew all the time, as if I were watching myself in a dream, that even if I had to ride the wave that I was riding, and could not resist, I must not speak out for it, I must not embrace and enjoy its inevitability, I must not look away from those it had overwhelmed and those things for the sake of which they had sunk beneath the surface of the sea, for these were the things that I believed in, too. My confession is that I heard that voice, faintly but incessantly, and I was able to ignore it. I went along, as they do now, with an immoral pride in force.

Obviously, mob action, the surrender to collective suggestion or force, is not new to civilization, and, taking into account its raw and elemental nature, it surely predated civilization and may outlast it. Hominids stoning a mammoth will find each other’s enthusiasm a practical necessity of bloodlust (although, strangely, the lust increases as the mammoth succumbs and the task eases). Hard-wired or not, this impulse and ability has come down through the ages intact. I used to believe that it was stronger in the male than in the female, until my daughters got to seventh grade, and often would return home wounded by the invisible feminine swordsmanship of which I had been unaware—and occasionally a casualty—all my life. There are more ways than one to drop a mammoth.

And I used to believe that, as in lynchings or a crowd turning on a supposedly transgressive outsider, the impulse was isolated: suppressed by law and custom, and naturally limited in that it was hard to kindle. My first encounter with it was in second grade, where a friend and I were ostracized by the other boys because he was poor and I was strange. We did quite well under our sentence of rejection, until one day when we were making a city in the sand and were so taken up in the construction of bridges, houses, and palisades built with twigs, that we didn’t notice an army of our classmates forming on