Losing our way

I’m on the road, so I could write about the unique sound of mourning doves calling in the American southeast, or about the way train horns hang long in moist air and never fail to sound lonely, especially when they wake you alone in the hollow, empty part of the night past 3 a.m.

But instead, I’m going to write about what we’ve forgotten — and maybe, what we simply don’t need to remember anymore, and about the fact that some of it, I miss.

This week, for a few moments, I got to glance through the handwritten workbooks of a man long dead, notebooks that outlined, among other things, precise numbers in a long list of logarithms. A diagram showing the calculations needed for trigonometric functions — a list of thinkers and philosophers, with a thumbnail paragraph that explained their ideas, and listed the years of their births and deaths.

An aide-memoire for someone without reference books or an internet-linked phone in easy reach, a quick way to remember Hegel or Kant or Pi.

The workbooks are singularly unnecessary now, not just because we are virtually always at least close to being online, but because most of us carry enough computing equipment around in our pockets to do all sorts of equations that we have otherwise forgotten how to do. That’s all fair enough.

I think it was Einstein who said that there’s no need to remember anything you can look up, implying, I guess, that there’s no need to clutter the mind’s living room with extra furniture. (The exact quote is “Never memorize something that you can look up.” I know because I just looked it up. On the phone. In my pocket.)

But there are clear skills that are being forgotten, and I wonder if some day that loss will be at our peril — or at least at the peril of a few of us who find ourselves beyond the reach of Wi-fi or cellular data.

Last year, I spent the better part of a week in a cellular dead zone — maps, and the skills needed to read and use them, became particularly important. What few road signs there were had to be noticed, remembered, and set into their particular context.

Without that skill, you’d be lost. I mean, quite literally lost, and lost in a desert, to boot.

This week, I’ve been well ensconced in the world of the GPS — I don’t regularly use one, but when you’re surrounded and squired around by people who use them constantly, you notice something quickly.

I’d call it geographic atrophy; and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Fully dependent on automated systems, you quickly find people who can’t tell you how to get somewhere, even when it’s somewhere they drive almost daily. Ride with them, and the GPS is a constant presence — they don’t need to remember the way, they don’t need to watch for turns, because they’ll be prompted in enough time to make the correct turn or lane change. They don’t need to remember the checkpoints of the world.

They are not doing what humans have been able to do for generations: they’re not building any kind of internal map of place and where they fit in it. They’re not looking at the angle of the sun, the hour of the day, the time of year, and fixing a direction that they need to go in, even if they don’t have a precise route.

You could listen to Einstein, and tell me right now that I’m cluttering up my headspace with complex memories of where I’ve been and where I should turn left or right. At the same time, in this province, direction is still a critical skill — there’s plenty of country that depends on your ability to find your way in and out again.

It’s a good reminder that labour-saving devices are, at the same time, skill-losing ones. Maybe we don’t need to know how to clear land and fertilize for potatoes, because it’s just so easy to pick them up at the store.

But lose your tools, and eventually you can’t build by yourself anymore.

Fully dependent on automated systems, you quickly find people who can’t tell you how to get somewhere, even when it’s somewhere they drive almost daily.