Books Before the Internet

The material out of which countries are made.

Dear reader,

A simple google search taught me that the official birthday of the internet is January 1st, 1983. I was born six years later.

I suspect that my ability to monetize my passions using an e-commerce platform is due to the minor age difference between the internet and I. We used to spend hours together, writing LiveJournal entries and soliciting attention from men in unmoderated chat rooms, before my brain was even halfway to being fully developed. My ability to not only be good at, but to thrive using something like social media, is not lost on me. I was primed for this.

I’m on a bus to New York after spending five days with my mother, whose brain is failing her. Though she can’t remember my partner’s name, what day it is, how I live, or how many times she’s been to the emergency room in one week for the same problem, my mother, born in 1951, can remember everything about her childhood and almost everything before 1983, too.

Short-term memory loss keeps my mother in the present, hostage to an unfolding, never-ending moment that floats away like a cloud as soon as it arrives. Alzheimer’s, dementia, or aging, is at times pretty fucking zen. My mother, at last a little Buddha, finally forced to forget the future and slow down enough to admire a duck floating on a wave, or the flowers growing out of a crack in the pavement.

I’ve never known how to talk to my mother. After this week, I still don’t know how to talk to somebody with dementia — and depression, paranoia, and anxiety — but I know how not to. It does not look like yelling at them on the sidewalk in the middle of the day, though it is bound to happen if the person is your mother.

The best I could do this week was to get her talking about the past. When I asked my mother pointed questions about memories from the time before the internet, she lit up. This she knows.

She told me about lapping up ice cream cones for 10¢, and about when her high school boyfriend killed himself in 1968 and how nobody, certainly not a social worker, ever talked to her about it afterwards.

She told me about living in Manhattan in the 1970’s, and the weekly decision of whether to use the extra 50¢ from her paycheck on the newspaper or on a subway ride to the Botanical Garden in the Bronx.

She told me about being forced to take swimming lessons at Walden Pond near Thoreau’s woods every summer, and about how much my grandparents loved each other.

We pawed through her books, my favorite of which was a well-worn Fodor’s travel guide to Italy from 1980, the same year she moved there to raise my brother and I. From the dog-eared corners and red ink underlines on dozens of pages, I traced my mother’s favorite steps. “Don’t get rid of this,” I pleaded with her, as if pleading is what helps people remember.

My plan is to get lost this summer, mostly underlining passages in books written before the internet. It’s not just the internet that’s overwhelming me right now: it’s the amount of new books, periodicals, and Substacks (okay, that’s the internet) I’m saddled with notified of every day.

Everybody, including me, wants to write something about being a better creative person, honoring our ancestors, dismantling “normal”, and forgiving the self and/or toxic parents. What if right now the best way I can honor my ancestors is to read books they would recognize?

Willa Cather, 1915, Colorado (Source: NY Books)

Dear reader, today is a thread-letter day. I would love for this letter to spark sharing and conversation within the Unsupervised community. Leave a comment directly, or respond to another reader’s comment and talk to somebody new.

✦ What are some of your favorite books written before the internet? Include a passage, if you like.

Here is an earth-shattering passage from a book I’m currently reading, borrowed from the communal library at the ranch. I know this book, I thought to myself when I noticed its worn spline on the shelf. I’ve never read it.

“I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over. When the straw settled down I had a hard bed. Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees, and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land — slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side.

I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it. I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the sheep-fold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me.

The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.”

Willa Cather, My Ántonia

1918