So a new friend has me thinking about Wendell Berry again. This evening I decided that I would pull up some old essays I had saved of Wendell Berry's that I thought I might enjoy reading later. Well, I could only, easily, find one article. My house contains four bookshelves and often smaller pieces of writing hide between or inside these books. Believe it or not I gleaned almost fifty books out of my collection last summer, but then added probably twenty-five in the past year. The collection evolves. This solitary article happened to be "Why I Am Not Going To Buy a Computer" reprinted in The Sun literary magazine. The article was originally published in 1987 in a collection of essays titled What Are People For? by the same author.
Irony enters here--as I was just priding myself on finally starting a blog again. I had one quite awhile ago. In fact, wrote 175 pages, when copied to a Word document, worth of posts. But that blog is in my past and we won't revisit its content. Lately, however, another good friend has been bugging me to start a food blog as I tend to tweak recipes or create my own. People are always asking me how I did this or that when they sample my food, and I can only sort of remember. Oftentimes, I have two or three recipes that I'm taking advice from at any given time to make my own recipe. So my dear friend suggested that if I started a food blog not only would I help others duplicate the dishes they enjoy eating, I would help myself remember exactly what I did to create that particular dish. Great idea; however, I'm single girl. I cook, but I don't cook much. A dish created on Monday can feed me for most of the week. So, a food blog is just not something I can sustain. Yet, I do want a record of what I do in the kitchen, so I'll probably have a few food posts here and there.
But back to my point, the desire to journal again has been spurred on by my summer boredom. As a teacher, my summer is pretty open, but financially I'm limited in what I can do. A lot of my money recently has gone into my home and toward my family. Travel is limited, as well, by my part time job that has me working on Mondays and Saturdays. Mid-week is always open, but the weekends are generally full of work, family, and church. So, to fill my time, I've decided that I might as well start writing again. I've been a writer intermittently all my life and am currently working on a novel. I can't say I love writing, but it is something that I must do for survival. I can live without it for bouts of time, but the need to write always resurfaces. In school, I used to write everything out by hand with a pen in a spiral bound notebook and then later type my writing for submission. I maintained this method of writing and journalling until well after college, but then slowly the ease of typing replaced this hard-copy first method. '
Lately, I've struggled with how best to preserve my writing. The ease of technology had definitely won me over in regards to the production of writing, but I fear losing my writing as technology progresses. I still have several 3 1/2 inch floppy disks with writing on them from my college years, writing that I will probably never see again. The paper copies of other pieces; however, still endure. Currently, my novel exists on a flash driver, on my hard drive, and somewhere in email space, but even that doesn't seem like enough. Should I be printing copies of the novel after every few pages I write? Wendell Berry talks about the environmental impact of powering countless computers for writers when the same work could be done by a manual typewriter. But would I write as much using this form? The last entry in my handwritten journal is a over a year old. Still, using this new blog as a way to journal, what is the permanence of this? Will someone stumble over my blog upon my death like they will my old journals? No-one will ever hold the pages in their hands, turn each page of words, and wonder about me. I've never really thought about the environmental impact of writing as Wendell does, but I did do an online quiz last year that showed me that to support the way I live it takes enough resources for four people. (I think this is the link for that quiz http://www.myfootprint.org/) That seems pretty selfish! So, thanks, Wendell, not only must I now consider how to best preserve my writing, I must also consider if it's getting in the way of living as simply as possible.
For now; however, I'm drawn to the keyboard. My words are flowing after a long drought, and I feel that relief that comes from scratching an itch--almost pleasurable. I'll work on the figuring out the best way to not lose these thoughts to our too quickly advancing world of technology. Honestly, I think it's time to purchase an external hard drive; hopefully, there is at least a decade or so before that type of storage become obsolete. Maybe an old fashioned 3-ring binder of printed pages would also be a viable back up system.
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