Elegy Written on a Printed Page

Those of us who live by the printed word face troubling times. In the village I noticed a For Sale sign in the window of our local bookstore. And a young man who is a newspaper reporter in Madison called to tell me that he will again be furloughed a week without pay this second quarter of the year.

At least his paper hasn’t joined the list of those across the country that have either filed for bankruptcy or closed their doors forever. And the possibility exists that our bookstore may reopen in another smaller location.

The first response, especially for readers and writers of a certain age, is to cry that the world is going to hell in a hand basket and to mourn for the good old days. But wiser heads know that the golden days of the past were filled with intolerance, superstition, and provinciality. And just as linguists no longer worry that language is deteriorating, moralists believe that we are neither destined for hell nor heaven, but muddle along doing the best we can.

Life is all about change, in the long run neither for better nor for worse. But change can be painful; we weep when we send our children off to school and when we send our parents off to the grave. Mutability, the poet sighs.

Independent bookstores are falling victim to Amazon.com and E-Bay, to big box bookstores and to the Kindle. Newspapers are succumbing to newscasts on television and the Internet, effortless information without cost.

And I weep for the passing, as I learn of yet another defunct newspaper, one more bookstore that is no more. But I continue to hope.

I find encouragement in the fact that at last people in this country are becoming disillusioned with corporate America, with the feudalistic economic system we have come to accept. Maybe we have reached a point at which we will move beyond the post-modern concept that New and Bigger and Improved is always better.

The big box home improvement store in Green Bay offers me cheaper products, at the cost of a tank of gas. But my local hardware store has a clerk, a retired plumber who can give me advice as well as direct me to the part I need; the young clerk in the box store can point me to the appropriate aisle.

Oil changes are cheaper in Green Bay, too, but once I returned to Northern Door to find that the kid who serviced my car forgot to replace the oil he had drained. My local garageman knows my car as well as he does me.

Amazon.com provides quick service, but my local bookseller has read many of the books in the store.

And while a glass screen is an efficient source of information, newsprint offers sensory satisfaction and leisure along with the stories of the day.

I am pleased that small organic farms have emerged as an alternative to the mega-fields that have developed in recent years. I am inspired by the fact that an increasing number of consumers would rather eat something grown in their community than the cheaper produce shipped from California or Chile or China.

Chain bookstores and conglomerate newspapers, like Henry Ford, mass-produce uniform products. But books and newspapers falling off an assembly line inherently narrow a point of view.

Let me step off my soapbox for a moment to confess that I do read USA Today when a hotel clerk offers me a complimentary copy, just as on occasion I big box shop in Green Bay or enter the controversial discount store in Sturgeon Bay, but man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for.

My young friend and all of the other reporters with uncertain jobs or no jobs at all, and all of the owners of struggling or failing independent bookstores, will ultimately be okay. William Faulkner in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech spoke of human resiliency in the face of nuclear destruction: “I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.”

We may at times be sad, but we, too, will be okay.