All having remains no less a preparation for loss

A very contemplative essay on reading, books, libraries and new technologies in Open Letters Monthly magazine, In Defense of the Memory Theater by Nathaniel Schneider.

As the business of reading technology continues along its trajectory, whether apocalyptic or utopian or both, perhaps those of us who continue to fancy ourselves concerned readers - however much we give in to the new and shiny - might turn our attention anew to what one might call "inner work." In the part of ourselves which is not technological, we could rediscover the tautology that what makes knowledge so precious is its precariousness, not the surety of our control over it. We'll need to cultivate the arts of memory and forgetting alluded to in these lines by William Blake, which came to me in a letter from a friend, a librarian who, for years now, has been slowly dying in a monastery:

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity's sunrise.

Even among these wonders now available to us and still to come, all having remains no less a preparation for loss.