Meditations from a Movable Chair

Dubus did not come by this insight cheaply. His physical and spiritual struggle depicted in these essays is real, and its outcome very much in doubt. These are not in any conventional sense inspirational essays, but in the end they offer a hard-nosed spirituality, a Marine's spirituality, if you will, that are appropriate to this time and this place.

Dubus's struggle is situated within larger struggles to reinvent the intellectual and spiritual life. Perhaps the most pervasive force pushing for such reinvention is the computer. There has been, and will most likely continue to be, a spate of books applauding or deploring the impact of computers and the Internet on the shape of our times. Unfortunately, few give pleasure or offer insight. One that does is Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace by James O'Donnell. It is more a series of meditations and reflections than a sustained or scholarly treatment, even though O'Donnell is a classical scholar who has done work on Cassiodorus and Augustine. He has also been active in developing web sites that contain most of his scholarly work and links to other sites as well. In fact, there is a web site constructed specifically as an adjunct to this book: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/avatars.

It is to O'Donnell's credit that he offers no apocalyptic pronouncements about the end of print-driven civilization - a Bucherdammerung to use George Steiner's phrase- or about the dawning of an age of new and better everything. Rejecting the role of either zealot or Luddite, he judiciously sketches the reality of the situation we are in and the alternatives suggested by history. Looming before us is the specter of a Darwinian struggle to survive, with the victorious bits of information serving as the basis for the story of their own survival. The defeated bits of information will be consigned, if they survive at all, to "ghost sites" which are inaccessible using normal search engines. They will become fossils buried in cyberspace.

Even though O'Donnell is a university professor, he foresees that libraries, or library-like institutions may eventually replace universities, just as universities replaced monasteries as the intellectual centers of Western civilization. Libraries- even virtual libraries- should no longer be regarded as being exclusively in the business of storing and conserving information. Libraries should be in the business of helping us to find the information we need. Librarians must become pathfinders and explorers in the wilderness of information. O'Donnell usefully points out in this context that the greatest storage bin of information, the Internet, is not really a library because "there is no organized cataloging, there is no commitment to preservation, there is no support system to help you find the difficult or missing resource. Finally, there is no filter: that is, there is none of the sense that a user of a great library has that somebody has thought about the possibilities and selected a set of materials to be both comprehensive and yet delimited. On the Internet you never know what you're missing" (70).