By DAVID IZRAELIVITZ
Los Alamos
Note to Reader: This Open Book column is part of my occasional “Ex Libris” series about books that have made a difference in my life. Hope you enjoy it.
I don’t know whether future generations will put any value or prestige on personal knowledge. Everything that you want to know is already out there on your smartphone. Want to replace some plumbing? Someone on YouTube will show you how. Can’t remember the name of a song playing at the coffee shop? Turn to Shazam. Need to solve a nasty mathematical expression, go to Wolfram Alpha. Want to know the details of a mid-19th-century war in Paraguay? Just Google “War of the Triple Alliance,” or easier yet, Google “war paraguay 19 century” Don’t know what to ask? Just have ChatGPT make up an interesting research topic for you.
We have progressed, or regressed depending on your perspective, in how we find information. From a voluminous library, we have moved on to Wikipedia, from there to Googling a question, then asking Siri so we don’t even know how to spell, and don’t even get me started about all that AI. Like the supermarket produce aisle, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge becomes ever more conveniently available. Sure, maybe prettier to look at, but less flavorful and less nutritious.
In our family, the representation of knowledge was not a tree, but an encyclopedia, specifically, the 1974 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, which featured a revolutionary reorganization of its contents. The Propaedia indexed all knowledge, the Micropaedia provided accessible bite-size morsels of knowledge, and the massive Macropaedia held in-depth essays. The 24 volumes, plus a three-volume Dictionary and oversized Atlas, were located at a place of honor in our basement den, surrounded by the detective novels that my father read to improve his English, and by several hundred Time magazines that were collected because, in our family we never threw anything away, whether it pertained to empty margarine containers or old weekly magazines. Like those margarine containers, my parents never got rid of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. My sister inherited those 24 volumes when my Mom and Dad passed.
Of course, as a fourteen-year-old, I didn’t think about my parent’s priorities displayed by this purchase, but now I realize that to both of them, but especially my Dad, it was a concrete expression of their values and expectations. My father had been a door-to-door salesman of Spanish-language encyclopedias, and that majestic collection with that weird “ea” embedded in it, was the model against which all others were compared, regardless of language.
As a nerdy kid, I was enthralled by those huge and heavy books, bound in rich (actually fake) leather encasing topic after topic in small print, thin pages, and very handsome gold (also fake) edging. Very much as the internet can now transport your attention from one subject to another, sometimes to great concepts and other times to trivialities, I would start with a homework assignment and eventually veer off on some tangent topic, volumes multiplying on the floor, until, pressed for time, I would return to the original topic.
As a parent of small children, we bought our own copy in 1996, just in time for those heavy volumes to become irrelevant, first by a CD-ROM version, and then by the internet. I joke now that their only remaining purpose is to help direct our friends to the guest bathroom, as in “Go to the encyclopedia and turn right.” But in my time, it directed my admiration and respect toward research and knowledge, and toward the generations of great thinkers who contributed to what we now call civilization. I leave it to your imagination to determine what ChatGPT’s contribution will be.
My son has the 1954 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica in his office, complete with a custom bookcase. He probably picked it up for free. It looks good and it makes for a handy side table. Nevertheless, my four-year-old grandson likes to look at the pictures. If I ever see him scatter the volumes all over the floor, I will get on my knees and start looking at pictures with him. We will have a great time and we will learn something important.
