library ad infinitum

My friend Kristin Parker is the archivist for Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Recently she shared this snippet of a letter Gardner received from novelist F. Marion Crawford, August 23, 1896:

The old fashioned novel is really dead, and nothing can revive it nor make anybody care for it again. What is to follow it?...A clever German who is here suggested to me last night that the literature of the future might turn out to be the daily exchange of ideas of men of genius—over the everlasting telephone of course—published every morning for the whole world....

There are a couple of ways to look at this rich quote. In the first, Crawford's vision is prophetic, if hasty. The nascent, steampunk, fin-de-siècle telephone network took a century to evolve into an internet. The struggle now is to comprehend and accommodate a daily exchange of ideas not among "men of genius," but among everyone with a connection.

But another way to spin this is to recognize the apocalyptic mode for what it is: not a harbinger, but a self-renewing mode of modern consciousness. The telephone didn't kill the novel; neither did radio, television, or rock 'n' roll. Yesterday, Barnes and Noble announced that its own ebook reader, the nook, will connect using the AT&T wireless network—the evanescent digitized great-grandchild of Ma Bell (who was still in utero in Crawford and Gardner's time).

I like to think the two perspectives aren't contradictory. Eras end, media grow old, new modes of consciousness emerge. And so human life is enriched.