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The Last Role of Twilight Paper
On prospective board members my institution desires to make a good impression. This is not easy because the standard campus tour includes classroom time, and I seem to be the only instructor teaching at the hour guests are free to attend a lecture. Over the years these classy people regularly show up at my classy room five minutes before the lecture begins. Because in my estimation I have only one outstanding lecture, I save it for this occasion. Years ago, in my middle teens I was told by our minister that I should read John Calvin, which I have done with great enthusiasm ever since. We named our first son, Calvin, in honor of the reformer of Geneva and our second son for his best friend, Farel, the reformer of Neuchâtel. I wanted to name our third son for Oecolampadius, the reformer of Basel, but, women being inexplicable, Margaret said, "No way!" On the first day of class I inform students that they will get the lecture on John Calvin, not in any logical sequence, but when a prospective board member shows up. None of us can predict when the administration will conceive a board member and deliver the same to the room where my labor occurs. Therefore, students must be able to detach their notes on Calvin and insert them in the proper location later. I always recommend the use of loose leaf notebooks. According to the Bible, the loose leaf system originated with Adam and Eve (who raised Cain as long as they were Abel). Speaking of sequencing, I once heard this three point sermon: (1) What were Adam and Eve thinking? (2) What were Adam and Eve doing? (3) Some thoughts on infant baptism. The problem today is that students come to class with all kinds of new fangled electronic gadgets for taking notes. Unlike notepaper these devices do not require a personal presence. Some day soon I expect to lecture to a room without a single person in it. On every desk there will be a voice-activated tape recorder. The result: students will sleep at home with their eyes closed rather than in class with their eyes open. My dear and kindly friend, Andrew Purves, claims that I am the world's last and greatest Luddite. Certainly I refuse to use a paint roller because it makes the work too easy. With a paint roller in hand even a good Calvinist can forget he is a sinner condemned to toil and trouble. "Double, double, toil and trouble; /Fire burn, and cauldron bubble" (Macbeth IV, 1, 10-1). Pen and paper was good enough for Paul and Silas and it is good enough for me. In the twentieth century my missionary father-in-law in East Africa wrote by hand on paper a letter to his mother every week for nearly fifty years. Each of these precious sheets took an adventurous and romantic trip by steamer north down the Akobo River, west along the Sobat turning north into the White Nile at Malakal joining the Blue Nile at Khartoum by train across the desert to Wadi Halfa down the Nile again through Egypt to Alexandria and by ocean liner across the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean to the little Presbyterian Church in Blairsville, PA, USA. By contrast, in the twenty-first century my missionary son in East Africa wrote a letter to his mother nearly every day by e-mail. These letters hopped through the air like a demented ether bunny with no intermediate exotic stops. Being a print freak and a paper person, I am afraid the heyday of paper is waning toward its twilight. I think of this situation as twilight paper going down the drain. However, in Chapter 13 of his Gargantua and Pantagruel (Volume 24 in the Great Books of the Western World), François Rabelais describes a great variety of ways to accomplish a task which regular people perform daily. In spite of being rather flushed, it is Charmin to realize that one role of twilight paper cannot be replaced by any computer.
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