David Beresford
ANOTHER COUNTRY
In view of the rivalry between the old Transvaal and the Cape, the fact that they hosted competing disasters in a matter of days – the Cape burning and now the Transvaal almost washed away in floods – offers further grounds for suspicion that You-Know-Who is playing silly buggers upstairs again.
One consolation amid all the misery, however, is that it has raised a new subject for dinner table conversations. This has been much overdue, even the most sensational and immediate of crime stories having long since been reduced by familiarity to boredom. Investigating gunfire outside my home recently, nobody raised so much as an eyebrow of interrogation when I returned to the table. I had to break into the conversation to announce to a less-than- surprised audience that it had been a neighbour blasting away in defence of a car belonging to one of our guests.
The new topic of debate, courtesy of natural disasters, seems to be: if your house is about to burn down, or be washed away, what are the first material possessions you would save? As a conversational gambit its popularity is enhanced by the opportunity it provides to parade one’s possessions. It has also created some anxiety in me over what to do with my large quarto edition of Johnson’s dictionary. It is not very valuable – from the nonplussed looks of the younger generation when I declare my determination to save it from flames and rain I would do well to trade it in for a ticket to Kurt Corbain’s last concert – but considering that it was in the bookshops (or the barrows) when the great man himself walked the streets of London one cannot help feeling a degree of responsibility for it. This is particularly so since its narrow escape last year from the deluge of a burst water tank.
My brother, an engineer who binds books as a hobby, has pointed out, however, that the dictionary is at least built to last – not only are the two volumes upholstered in heavy leather, but the rag-paper is in virtually the same condition as it was when it was bound more than 200 years ago. Modern books, he explained, were made of acetate-based paper and the print would have faded, the pages yellowed – not to mention the leather cracking and the glue binding disintegrating – long ago.
This news was greeted with horror on my part. Every writer, I fancy, even as lowly as a hack, nurses the fantasy that something of their work will survive their mortality – if only a sweetly phrased observation which will be repeated around the high table in the teflon-panelled dining hall of some university in the distant future.
Clearly one’s chances of making it into the future will be a factor of how long one’s work stays in print, even if it is in the minimalist sense. So I have been worrying about how to preserve the “corpus” (so to speak) of my work.
Digital storage I instinctively ruled out, considering the discouraging regularity with which my hard disks crash. Besides, the turnover in operating systems suggests that archaeologists of the future will need the chance discovery of several electronic Rosetta Stones before being able to decipher all my jottings.
So I introduced my own “Project Gutenberg”, an ambitious project to ransack those digital archives and print out “The Complete Works” for posterity and at least a stab at immortality.
Although I am only a quarter of the way through this ambitious project the shock of my brother’s announcement can be imagined. I rushed to town in search of supplies of Epson-compatible rag-paper. From the blank looks I get from the pimply-faced youths who serve in stationery shops nowadays they not only have never heard of rag-paper, but if one described the functioning of a rag it would earn a derisive cry of: “Oh, you mean a jiffy-pad!” Disconsolately I return home and turn on television to watch our fellow citizens mopping and scraping up their treasured possessions. The resigned looks on their faces brought to mind a moment in Samuel Pepys’s diary when he recorded a bribe he had paid to the sexton of St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street. It was to shuffle along the bones of the privileged dead, buried under the pews, to make room for his brother’s corpse.
Old words. Old bones. Built-in obsolescence. There must be some way of beating the system?