In many ways, I feel that I am a barbarian at the gate
Craig Nova
I am not a technical man. In fact, I am about as far away from being one as is possible in an industrial country at the tag end of the twentieth century. As an author of novels, however, I engage in the same pursuit as those who are involved in an understanding of things from a technical perspective. This similarity is a devotion to being precise. A computer programmer or other technically skillful human being may exhaust all possibilities, or gather all available information, before making a decision. A fiction writer's work is done intuitively and with the ability that E. M. Forster, one of the great English novelists, described as the gift to judge the whole by the part.
I came to computers slowly, resistin
g them because, as far as writing is concerned, a word processor's greatest strength, its ability to allow for infinite editing, lets you confuse movement for action. My first computer was a dinosaur called a Wangwriter. It sat on the floor like a heart-lung machine. When it was installed in the room where I work (in Vermont), I was told that it had to be kept at a constant 68F.
I didn't want to hurt the feelings of the technician who told me this, but I heat my office with a wood stove, and, in general, I couldn't guarantee 68F even in the summertime. I have done many stupid things in my life, and I am ashamed of them all, but getting up in the middle of the night to put wood in the stove to keep the computer warm wasn't going to be added to the list.
But, of course, I was hooked, and my understanding of computers advanced quickly, usually as a result of some new and unforeseen disaster, not to mention that I share the human fascination with making machines easier or more efficient to run. With
the passage of time, it became clear to me that the things I had learned about computers were leading to one specific place: the Internet.
There are times when I have needed to know the patterns of colors of the wings of certain butterflies found only in specific regions of the Amazon Rain Forest, the details of complications in the medical treatment of gunshot wounds, the specifics of love potions that have been concocted over the years, and countless other details that reflect upon the activities of human beings. It is hard to suggest what enthusiasm and delight a novelist feels at the prospect of easily obtained information.
I have spent months learning how to manage the Internet's commands, its vagaries, and its blind alleys. At its best, the Internet seems like magic. Recently, in the space of 24 hours, I asked for and received information about what insects were on a trout stream in Austria. When I was there, I caught 20-inch brown trout on imitations of the species of insects I had learn
ed of by way of the Internet. I was now certain that only very rarely does something new come into the world, and the Internet is one of these rare, new things.
Still, learning how to use it, even imperfectly, has taken too much time. In the room where I work, you'll find a pile of Internet manuals, the stack of them sitting there like proof incarnate of the fact that there is something amiss here. I am well aware that some people think that the very difficulty of the Internet is a benefit, keeping undesirables out. And while this may be true, it also has the whiff of elitism, not to mention a thinly disguised hostility to those who are less than adept with computers.
Sometimes I can get the Internet to work, and other times I can't. When I can't, I look in a manual, which always says, with a whiff of condescension, ``Oh, that. That's easy. Here are the commands. Easy as pie.'' The next thing I know, I'm lost. The commands don't apply. Or they apply only to the specific gopher or search utility
of the example of the manual. The manuals imply a coherence that doesn't seem to exist, and there seem to be more exceptions than rules.
The truth, though, is that the promise of the Internet is not false. And it is this promise that leads me on, learning a little more each day; but as I do, I am tantalized by the notion of more graceful access. I am aware that there are better front ends than the one I have, and that there are new (and yet untried) connections. Perhaps the solution is there, and I just haven't found it yet.
In many ways, I feel that I am a barbarian at the gate. From the other side of it, I can smell the sweet perfume of paradise, and yet I am condemned to fiddling with the lock. There are a lot of people like me, imperfectly hooked up to the Internet, impatient, waiting for what we know to be there, just beyond our reach: easy, complete access to information.
Craig Nova is the author of eight novels and the recipient of many awards and prizes, including an Awa
rd in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. You can reach him on the Internet at
sextans@delphi.com
.
Slouching Toward the Internet
