Chapter 35 — The Weight of the Pen
Rufus compares audiobooks to written text.
Followed by Chapter 35 —— The Weight of the Pen, in which Saskia makes a note of the lottery numbers.
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Hello Friends,
Mulling over last week’s commentary, it occurs to me that there are some literary snobs who will insist that not only are spoken words not text, but audiobooks aren’t reading. I’d like to offer the contrary opinion.
It might surprise those of you who don’t know me well that I am a painfully slow reader. I struggle with foreign movie subtitles. And I often simply freeze up when there’s a mission critical reading requirement like digesting written instructions while someone else is looking on; filling out an intake form at a doctor’s office is painful. I often joke about having gone into mathematics, in part because it didn’t require a significant reading volume (working through a couple of pages of concepts is generally regarded as a banner day).
In fact I found my way to writing through pictures. Images, I love. Indeed, if I have a superpower, it might well be navigation, and I believe what underpins that is “seeing” the map. It is natural to me to see how walking north along a road will reach the same point as walking northeast, then northwest. Moreover, I usually have a pretty good sense of where those two paths will cross. I’m even pretty good at accounting for winding roads and corners that are not at right angles.
In any event, my interest in photography gave way to cinematography, which opened me up to dialogue and before I knew it, I was engaging with story. As you know by now, my firm belief is that writing is story, and so it was that I backed my way into writing books.
At the risk of going out on a limb, I’m going to liken books to theatre in an analogy that makes audiobooks the equivalent of film. If you’ll indulge me a little further I’d note that both theatre and film use text as part of their building process, even if neither exhibits text in their final product. Curiously, you might argue that audio has been around a lot longer than moving pictures and that my seeing audiobooks as the analogue of film is folly; and that were audiobooks to surpass written ones in popularity, they would have already done so. As a counter to that I note that written text has always been both significantly easier to produce, and benefit from, than audio content, but that dynamic is now shifting (it’s only recently that we all started walking around with a smartphone in our pockets, and text on the phone is less readily digested than audio).
For me, personally, novels were always a bit of a slog, with the time and effort to appreciate them not quite matching the joy derived. I can see that for others who read much faster that would not be the case. In any event, the calculus changed dramatically for me with the advent of audiobooks and podcasts. Moreover, judging by the recent rise in popularity of audio content I suspect I’m not the only one.
To be clear, I don’t think written content will disappear, I just think the relative popularities will continue to shift. One thing I will say for written content is that it is easier to time travel through the text, skimming to find something you wanted to reread … though I suspect even that will improve as LLMs get integrated into the playback function; imagine being able to ask: “when was it that Rufus talked about the kindest thing anyone had ever done for him again?” (the commentary before chapter 8, in case you were wondering, though for now I still had to skim back over the written text of previous episodes to find it).
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
And now, without further ado, here’s chapter thirty-five, in which Saskia makes a note of the lottery numbers.
— 35 —
The Weight of the Pen
Saskia returned to the hotel room. She freshened up in the bathroom while winding time back, until she heard her earlier self leave. Then, she turned time around again and emerged to play through the same scene she’d lived earlier. The exchange felt like reading a script, and left her grateful that she’d committed to herself to avoid such interactions. It was both weirdly intimate and lonely, at the same time.
She did catch one detail she’d missed the first time around, though. There was a fourth copy of herself, sitting behind the counter in the kitchen alcove. Her fourth self had been narrowly outside her youngest self’s eye-line. Presumably the fourth her was the one with the lottery loot in her pocket. Or maybe she’d stuffed it inside the backpack on her back.
In any case, she ignored, and was ignored by, the Saskia in the kitchen. Again she felt cold, seeing herself and not even acknowledging her other id for fear of duplication. And it felt ironic, too, given that there were already four copies of herself, albeit, she trusted, all genuinely her same self.
The Saskia on the couch stirred, and Saskia wondered if what was about to happen was what she suspected. Couch Saskia got up and started moving backwards towards Saskia, who had just dispatched the earlier version of herself outside, into the corridor. Halfway across the room, couch Saskia disappeared and Saskia realized it was time to head her way. She moved in that direction, reversing her path through time as she did.
Sitting on the couch, Saskia wound the morning back into night. As she did so, she copied the lottery numbers from the paper onto the hotel stationary that rested on the coffee table. Though it felt natural to her to write the numbers from left to right, it occurred to her that a hypothetical independent observer seated beside her on the inoffensive floral fabric of the sofa would have witnessed her doing something she could never have simply done; played in the hypothetical witness’ traditional flow of time, Saskia would have just perfectly judged the un-writing of the six winning numbers across the page, from right to left, perfectly ending at the spot that she started on the left margin. Then again, perhaps it wouldn’t have looked so crazy, as it would have appeared that she was back-tracking along the digits that were already there. No, that would have been crazy, since the ink from her pen, when witnessed in the standard forward flow of time, would have lifted from her paper exactly as she’d traced the digits and come to rest inside the tip.
What would today’s AI descendants of the early handwriting-reading programs have made of that, Saskia wondered.
She smiled to herself at the thought and slipped the sheet of paper into the pocket of her jeans. It seemed somehow reasonable that with it safely stowed there, not withstanding the earlier snafu with the backpack, the numbers would be there for her to read off yesterday evening when she went out to buy her ticket.
The one oddity that lingered in Saskia’s mind as she laid the pen back on the coffee table was the weight of the pen. It felt considerably heavier than it looked. It was not the first time she’d noticed objects around her seemed to possess extra momentum whenever she was speeding the clock one way or another, and Saskia noodled on this as she raced back towards the night before.
∞
At last, afternoon daylight filtered in around the edges of the ineffectual ‘blackout curtains’, and through the whipping sheer drapery in front of them. The frenetic motion of the translucent gauze robbed it of its aura of weightlessness. That was, until Saskia slowed her slippage through time, and the material regained a gentle flutter. Then, as Saskia brought the time around her to an almost complete stop, the fabric froze in place as she walked towards it. She barely felt its inertia at all as her hand grazed the textile and she left the room.
She let time around her begin to flow in its normal direction again. It was time to go buy her lottery ticket.
She smiled to herself as she walked down the corridor. In a testament to the fact that Saskia’s id only moved one way along her life-line, she remained blissfully unaware of the problem that was about to arise.
