Allison Render – Fantasy Writer

On a recent Sunday, while travelling alone, I spent forty minutes waiting to eat brunch. As I sat in the crowded restaurant foyer and then at the counter, I devoured several New York Times magazine articles. I learned about the unintended consequences of allowing college athletes to make their own sponsorship deals, about the war on inflation, and about haggling for high-end wristwatches. When I finally got my pulled pork eggs benedict, I considered the wait time well spent.

I had travelled to Victoria, the island capital of British Columbia, for a long weekend getaway. Vancouverites know Victoria for its slow pace, overt Britishness, and its equally overt left-wing politics. You can hike around a forested lake, enjoy a traditional afternoon tea in a ritzy hotel, browse a collective, volunteer-run bookstore, and stuff yourself with a honey coconut bun in Chinatown (but not all in one day—that wouldn’t be relaxing).

I embraced the slow pace and the quiet. I left Vancouver with two books, a stack of magazines, and a sock I was knitting. I finished one book and several magazines, but returned with two more books, a mostly finished sock, and very few pictures.

I read on city buses, on the 19-passenger plane as it hopped across the Salish Sea, in the queue at Pagliacci’s and The Ruby, and even in my hotel room. As I read, I realized how rarely I get to to absorb several chapters or a long magazine article in one sitting. Normally, my mind leaps to the next chore or the next email.

The Internet has brought endless information to our pockets, but also endless noise. Every video comes with six recommendations. Every article leads to a rabbit hole of hyperlinks and recommended articles. Social media feeds are infinite. Reading a single article, or watching only one video, becomes an act of resistance. We can be entertained and informed at every waking hour and never have a quiet moment to think.

Print is different. If the Internet is a crowded room where strangers shout obscenities at you, print is a respectful one-on-one conversation on a quiet patio, when you’ve both left your smartphones on silent in the kitchen. The Internet shouts for attention. Books whisper. And then, sometimes abruptly, sometimes elegantly, they end—leaving only silence.

I know it’s ironic that I’m writing an ode to print on a blog. And that I drafted this blog post in cursive on a legal pad before typing it into a laptop. I can’t eliminate technology from my life, and I don’t want to. I’m old enough to remember—vaguely—how difficult it was to find information and media before Google, Wikipedia, streaming video, and massive free online databases. It often involved phone calls (on a landline), trips to libraries, visits to movie rental stores, or waiting until the local radio station’s news update. Once you had the right book, you needed to use tables of contents, indexes, skimming, and much cursing to find the right page.

The Internet is a fantastic tool. But every time I disconnect, I remember it is a tool, not a home. We need the quiet of the offline world to focus and create and to turn the barrage of information now available to us into useful knowledge. We need the quiet to engage with stories that are longer than 500 words, to appreciate the beauty of nature, and to see what is in front of our nose. Embrace the quiet.