January 31

I really love books.  Growing up we lived a block and a half from the local public library.  It was (is) a Carnegie Endowment library: deep brown brick, wide front steps, beautiful domed lobby, old polished wood counter.  Much of my childhood was spent in there reading, sitting on a leather hassock with my feet up on a cast iron radiator in the winter.

Since I've never used an ereader I have no idea if I'd even want to read a book on one.  Anne has a Nook so I should borrow it and give  it a try.  That said, the coolest tool I've ever seen is the Apple iPad.  I don't own one yet because I cannot think of a good reason that I need an iPad only lots of reasons why I want one.  In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyer talk about computers as they were in 1986.  The technology has gotten smaller, lighter, and more elegant, but the mystery of it still holds.

MOYERS:  Machines help us to fulfill the idea that we want the world to be made in our image, and we want it to be what we think it ought to be.

CAMPBELL:  Yes. But then there comes a time when the machine begins to dictate to you. For example; I have bought this wonderful machine -- a computer. Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine -- it seems to me to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy.

MOYERS:  There is a fetching story about President Eisenhower and the first computers --

CAMPBELL:  -- Eisenhower went into a room full of computers. And he put the question to these machines, "Is there a God?" And they all start up, and the lights flash, and the wheels turn, and after a while a voice says, "Now there is."

MOYERS:  But isn't it possible to develop toward your computer the same attitude of the chieftain who said that all things speak of God? If it isn't a special, privileged revelation, God is everywhere in his work, including the computer.

CAMPBELL:  Indeed so. It's a miracle, what happens on that screen. Have you ever looked inside one of those things?

MOYERS:  No, and I don't intend to.

CAMPBELL:  You can't believe it. It's a whole hierarchy of angels -- all on slats. And those little tubes -- those are miracles.