Old School Reading

From college to 1990 I have taken notes on 3×5 lined cards and carefully filed them away in metal (and later, plastic) card files. I’ve been hauling those card files around the country for nearly 50 years.

I bought my first portable computer in 1989—a “luggable” that weighed over 12 lbs (with adapter, extension cord, and floppy disks) and all of it barely fit into my oversized rucksack. It transformed my research. Kansas State University had a passable theological library. I couldn’t check books out, but as a pastor, I had access to the stacks, and I spent many a day, during my nearly four years as a pastor in Blue Rapids, Kansas, reading and taking copious notes in the majestic library reading room.

In 1989 I began lugging my computer to the library and entering my notes directly into the computer. That was not only a time-saver, but because of a computer’s search ability, it was far easier to find notes that I had taken that were only tangentially related to what I was doing at the moment. For 35 years, I have had my many laptops by my side when reading books to take notes and I have carefully updated the many notes from the Lotus Office suite to WordPerfect to MS Word, and now to Libre Office Writer.

A couple of weeks ago I purchased Bruce McCormack’s The Humility of the Eternal Son. I prefer to do my reading out on the patio when the weather cooperates, but the day I started reading it, I didn’t have the energy to drag all the accouterments of my movable office out to the patio. Instead, I went old school and grabbed the book, a stack of 3x5s, and a pen.

My laptop is efficient and far faster than writing out note cards by hand, but I had forgotten the sheer joy of putting pen to paper and copying text by hand from book to note card. It’s slow; it’s a bit messy because ballpoint pens tend to get a bit gunky, especially when one is underlining passages on the page; it’s surprisingly disorderly (a fact that I had forgotten).

But here I am a couple of weeks later, done with the book, and a stack of note cards I’m now trying to figure out what to do with. (Transcribing them into the computer seems to violate the spirit of the old-school exercise I just completed.) Reading the book in this manner was weirdly satisfying. There was a right-ness to the slow process that I have lost in my 35 years of being on the technological cutting edge.

And yes, my enslavement to technology doesn’t stop there. Several of my academic books are on my Kindle and several more, in pdf format, are on my tablet, so paper has been increasingly disappearing from my life. But in my defense, my previous academic book was $170 in hardcover but I opted for the pdf galley prints available through my academia.edu subscription. So you Wendell Berry-ites out there can complain all you want, and I’ll even go along with your sensibilities if you fork over the $170 so I can order the hardcover from my local, privately owned bookstore.

Maybe the Mark of the Beast that appears on the wrist isn’t a 666 or some weird symbol; maybe it’s the appearance of carpal tunnel syndrome from taking so many notes on that 12 lb beast of a computer. But even if that were true, I believe I’ve postponed the mark by a few weeks by reintroducing myself to taking notes on 3×5 note cards.