The Beautiful, Analog Classroom
I wonder how many college campuses no longer have bookstores, and how many will soon no longer have libraries with physical books. Over the last decade there has been a big shift towards first purchasing and then just renting access to digital texts. Along with that, many schools have their students complete all their assignments and assessments online. In some cases, it makes sense to have a textbook that can be digitally updated, or to buy a textbook that comes with digital study tools. For Great Books classes like mine, the digital texts don’t make a lot of sense, and renting texts (as though you might not want to return to them later in life, and who needs marginalia anyway?) is a wasted long-term opportunity.
When I was in my doctoral studies I spent a lot of time with unpublished manuscripts from the scientist/philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. He left roughly 100,000 unpublished pages of notes, drafts of books and articles, diagrams, and translations. What a treasury!
Later, when I was writing my book on the environmental vision of C.S. Lewis, Narnia and the Fields of Arbol, I had the privilege of spending time in the Lewis archives at the Wade Center at Wheaton College. The Director, when he learned that I was studying Lewis’ work in environmental philosophy, disappeared into a back room and then came out holding Lewis’ copy of Henri Bergson’s Évolution Créatrice. Lewis read that book while in the hospital, recovering from wounds he suffered in WWI. Every page was filled with Lewis’ marginalia. Again, what riches, to hold the book that Lewis held a century before me, and to see his pen strokes that were a record of his reflections.
This semester for the umpteenth time I am teaching Plato’s Republic. My copy is worn, full of post-it notes and bookmarks, with pencil marks on every page: underlined passages, circled words, notes in the margins, questions the text provoked, summaries of arguments, diagrams and sketches of Plato’s ideas, summaries and outlines of chapters. The book is no longer just Plato’s book. It is a record of a long conversation, with my part of that conversation stretching back almost forty years. Yesterday in class as we discussed the book, my students were full of questions and observations. They had paper copies of the same translation open before them, (it has been in print a long time, and those copies are cheap.) The conversation was not about a dead author; it was very much about living questions for our time.
