We have moved our office. Over the last forty years I have moved the office three times. This last move is the fourth and probably the last. All the previous moves were from a smaller space to a larger. In the past, moving day took about a day. We always needed more room. Each time, it felt like you were taking off tight pants and putting on trousers that fit. “Ah, that’s better.”
This move? I kept feeling like I was settling an estate, maybe my estate. I was throwing away a lot of my stuff. I’ve been feeling like an old man getting ready to move to the rest home or the retirement village. This move, this estate I was settling, was not mine, it was Paper’s. I was performing a requiem for Paper. Desks, files, secretaries, libraries - all those essential accoutrements of the office linger only as reminders of the past. We don’t need all that paper anymore.
Ex Officio
“Office” means both the seat of authority, cognate with officer and officiant, and the place where official work is done. The Latin word was contracted from opificium, literally "work-doing." Like Torah scrolls in a shul, you couldn’t hold or do ‘office’ without the bona fide documents to confer authority and promulgate rule. Public or private, in person or in place, the principal is in his office, and he’s got the chops.
We are moving the office into a house I’ve been fixing up. I bought it a couple of years ago and wrote a post about it last January. It’s been a restoration, not a remodel. We tried to imagine the past rather than invent the future. We re-glazed a lot of window joinery in the process. I don’t recommend a project like this for the financially faint of heart. It’s an investment, but not a good investment. But maybe not the worst investment - at least I didn’t renovate an office building. We now have our offices in a house. We didn’t turn a house into an office. It didn’t start out as an office project, but sometime last autumn I realized it might as well be. Office space in 2024 is no longer about paper, so we don’t need much space.
I moved first. My bookkeeper and secretary moved two weeks later. I moved on the twelfth of February. Which happens to be my dad’s birthday. If he were living, he would have turned ninety this year. He grew up working in my grandfather’s newspaper office in Osceola, Iowa. It was more than a mere office and usually we called ‘the newspaper.’ It was a workplace, with lots of ‘help.’ Some of my earliest memories were going to the newspaper office with my dad.
I am sure he had the same memories from his youth. He said he learned his alphabet in a California job case putting away cold-type headlines. He wasn’t even twelve years old, and he was going in at four AM on Saturdays to build a fire and melt down all the week’s hot-type and recast it into three-pound lead ingots. Lead, ink, presses, photos and paper - that was the substance of the newspaper to my mind. The journalism was an afterthought to me. They say a child working with his parent is engaged in the highest form of play. I think my father and I were of the same mind - nobody was oppressing or exploiting my ten-year-old father, making him smelt lead at four in the morning. He and I both knew those were his glory days. For both of us, in our imaginations, making a newspaper with our father was the highest form of play.
My dad could see the end of paper. Even in 1967 he imagined he could read the handwriting on the wall. When they sold the newspaper, and we moved to Wyoming, he told me he could make a living owning the newspaper. But at the end he would have to lock the door and walk away. There would be no value left. At the time I felt like he was ruining my dreams and stealing my childhood. But he was right. Even his timing was pretty close.
School and paper. If we had no internet, paper would still be the rule. I can’t think of anything we did at school that didn’t involve paper. We had to learn to read and write. It took paper. Sure, we could have used slates, what a great renewable resource idea! My grandmother told me, when she was a kid, you didn’t waste paper, not at home, not at school. You used both sides. There was no literacy without paper. There was no accounting without paper. All the books were made of paper. You couldn’t even run the mimeograph machine without paper. (You could drink the alcohol, but everyone knew it would make you go blind.) The teacher taught you the arts of reading, writing and arithmetic. Her work was indivisible from paper. You are not permitted to use your crayons except on paper. Now we did have 16mm films and 35mm filmstrips, but by fourth grade I understood the difference between learning and teaching. I never complained when we watched films. But I noticed the teacher wasn’t teaching, she was sitting in the dark, watching with her students.
But we do have the internet and it is the paper-slayer. I’m at a Super-8 earlier this week. I’m paying a week’s rent for some of my guys. The owner’s son is taking care of me. His sweatshirt says, “Class of 2031.” He is ten or eleven years old. He has no difficulty. He understands the computer and knows the rules. As he is taking care of the ‘paperwork,’ I ask him, “what is the point of school if the internet can answer all your questions? Do we need school, do we need teachers?” He says, “yeah, if you want to be successful in life you have to go to school. You need to get a degree.” I respond, “right, you have to have credentials. But do you need teachers, can the internet be your teacher?” He said, “I don’t know, maybe.” I said, “why don’t you ask your teacher if the whole idea of school has turned into a credentialing racket, maybe it isn’t about teaching anymore.” He smiled and said, “no, I think it would make him mad. I am sort of a troublemaker. I had to go to the principal’s office once.” “Me too kid, me too, I understand.”
I miss my dad. I even miss some of my old teachers. I miss all the paperwork too. I know how powerful the network is. I know it’s a delight to our eyes. I know I can watch a YouTube video and figure out most anything. I make no trips to the library. The Post Office used to be the heart of our little village and our nation too. The circulatory system for our paper-dependent communications, and the greatest job-security going. Now our Post Office has signs out front, ‘help wanted.’ No more paper routes or paperboys. I will keep sending out Christmas cards until I die. And there will always be the Charmin. There is no country for old newspaper men. This time, it's different.
In the time of Jesus of Nazareth, there was literacy, but not much paper, (or vellum). The memory function is not made stronger by books. Jesus hid the Torah and the prophets in his heart. And from the other authors of the New Testament and even Christ's enemies - everyone more or less remembered what the Word of God said.
The demise of paper has been predicted and a trend is in place but, yes, the process is still ongoing and it is not completely dead. From the retelling of your history and experience I sense your angst. I think it interesting to see it in context of why we have paper in the first place. How do I put this in words? If we, at this time in history, had mental vigor and retention we would not need paper or other physical devices to help with the processes necessary to get things done. Technology is not yet able to substitute for paper and mental ability is flagging.