Owning and Reading Books May Be the Most Countercultural Thing You Can Do

The problem in our country isn’t with books being banned, but with people no longer reading … You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. —Ray Bradbury

One of my favorite things to do between late March and early May is to walk through the woods near my home in search of spring ephemerals — may apples, trout lilies, bloodroot, Dutchman’s breeches — those fleeting wild perennials that appear for just a few short weeks after the snow melts before retreating underground, leaving no trace until they reemerge the following year.

I experience something of the same sensation now when I try to locate an article or video clip I saw but didn’t save, or media I thought I owned, but which seems to have disappeared. Here one day, gone the next. No footprint or trace that it ever existed, except in my memory.

Several years back, I decided to digitize my files, believing this would add permanence to my collections while occupying far less space than the reams of receipts printed in disappearing ink, yellowing papers, fading photos, deteriorating VHS tapes, and CDs that skip. And then one day my external hard drive hit the ground while the internal disc was still spinning, and that was it. Nearly 20 years of financial records, family photos, and who-knows-what-else were irretrievably lost. Sometime after, a new solution to the storage problem emerged: “The Cloud”! I would never again have to worry about my digital media being lost or damaged — it would live forever in The Cloud!

Until it doesn’t.