Oddments of High Unimportance

Link: Ebooks—What We Gain, What We Lose | doug toft (Web Archive link)

Writer Doug Toft finished reading a big book on his Kindle, and noted the positives and negatives of ebooks, ending with a pensive quote from David Byrne:

I also have a funny feeling that, like much of our world that is disappearing onto servers and clouds, eBooks will become ephemeral. I have a sneaking feeling that like lost languages and manuscripts, most digital information will be lost to random glitches and changing formats. Much of our world will become unretrievable—like the wooden houses, music, and knowledge of our ancient predecessors. I have a few physical books that are 100 years old. Will we be able to read our eBooks in 100 years? Really?

Byrne is right to be concerned about the persistence of ebooks. Ebooks and PDFs will last only as long as there is technology – hardware and software combined – to run and display them.

Consider that most of the books and artifacts of written language we have from the ancient world survived by accident, before the age of temperature- and humidity-controlled rooms, before the age of professional librarians and curators. We have a great understanding of paper’s tolerances and preserving books and paper is not that expensive, overall. Digital objects are, by comparison, more fragile and, as Byrne notes, more ephemeral.

Updated 2026-01-10

Each of us has a different capacity to give to others without losing ourselves. Some of us can give only a bit, some of us give so much there is nothing of us left. Your real job, not necessarily the one you get paid for, is to find the opportunity to infuse meaning into your life by challenging yourself to give in a way that jeopardizes your happiness.

Look around for where you can make a big difference. It is likely a place that will shake you up.

jellobiafrasays:

the psychopathology of everyday life (1951 ed.)

pickyourheadup:

The Nightmare.

Dimon keeps track of his bank’s business by scribbling on a sheet of paper in his coat’s breast pocket. The notes are divided into two columns: one for “things I owe people” and the other for “things people owe me,” according to people who’ve worked with Dimon. “He carries it until he’s used every square centimeter and the paper is old and crinkled,” says Michael Welborn, the former head of retail banking at Bank One, which Dimon ran before he merged it into JPMorgan Chase. “He is unbelievable at grasping details and the big picture at the same time.”

On one of my last visits, even as my father was in severe pain, he asked me the same question he always did: What are you reading?

I fluffed my feathers a bit and said: Kierkegaard. “What is he telling you?” asked my dad. I had just been reading a volume of Kierkegaard’s journals on the train, immersed in the poetic ruminations of the great Danish philosopher. So I immediately spouted, verbatim and with the appropriate pauses for world-weary effect, the words I still remember to this day: “No individual can assist or save the age. He can only express that it is lost.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, my dad retorted: “He’s right. But that’s exactly why you must try to assist and save the age.”

In that one moment, my dad put a callow youth gently in his place, out-existentialized the great existentialist and gave me words to conduct a career by.

More and more I feel that, just as all art aspires to the condition of music, all humour should really aspire to the condition of Wodehouse.

(via Philip Sandifer: Writer: There’s Another Way: Throw Away Your Guns (The Family of Blood))

(via ‘How Dare It Make Me Feel So Much’: The Spell of F. Scott Fitzgerald - Joe Fassler - The Atlantic)