eBooks

I was reading about Google's eBooks.
Then, Friday, we had a power outage. The temperature was in the upper 20's and the wind was mild, so there would not be a rapid loss of heat in the house, as there would have been if it had been a windy day, for we live upon a prominent hill, and the wind bangs the shutters when the fugitive breezes blow.
The G____s, the Indian family down at the end of the street, have a new baby, born the 23rd of December, so I walked by there. The wife's father was outside and we chatted about when the Edison company expected the power to be back on. The lady at the Edison hot line had asked me whether I was running on generator when I had called. I wished I had had a generator. Water lines freeze when it gets too cold and the wind whips up the hill.
We would have hot water; the water heater did not require electricity. Even if the pilot light went out, there was no electric ignition, rather a primitive yet simple and dependable process of lighting a long, thin stick and inserting it into the access door.
The heat was gas, too, but the furnace blower was electric.
As time went on, the extent of the outage was seen to cover a larger territory, and 1,000 to 5,000 homes and businesses were affected. The traffic lights were out,which was good news, for it indicated that this would be considered a serious matter, and take a high priority in the order of repairs, even though there was no reason to think that there would be wide spread problems: there had been no ice storm, the snow was negligible; in fact, the winter was taking on the pattern of the winters of recent memory - cold and snow in December and not too much to speak of here while out East and West and South blizzards went through with annoying punctuality.
Power was out from 11:25 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. The appliances, which had all flatlined at 11:25,  now hummed and those with time displays told us "PF" - power failure - and waited for our attentions to set them back on their courses of duodecimal tolling of the hours.

Of course, we had AT&T Uverse and that base was dead, so there was no telephone other than the cell phone, and there was no cell phone re-charge unless one had a car charger for the phone. I did not like the feel of that. I wished now that I had a generator - even though I would not easily be able to control the exhaust from it, and did not desire to die of carbon monoxide poisoning -  and I wished I had a car cell phone charger.
My computer had four hours of battery life, and I set it for maximum power savings. However, I found that my Verizon WiFi card did not find a connection. This was very surprising, and I had to assume that somehow Verizon had also been affected locally.

I had turned everything off that I knew had been on. I had drawn the drapes over all the windows to conserve heat. I was standing in the kitchen when I saw a glow from the bedroom, and I wondered at it. A humming to my left indicated the Frigidaire had been CPRed back to life and that glow was the small light on the bedroom dresser. I was relieved, for we had gone through an ice storm many, many years ago, and we had no fireplace anymore to sleep in front of. I no longer had to concern myself with turning off the water lines by midnight if the elecricity had not come on, nor would the G______s have to find lodging at one of the hotels nearby.

If I had had an eLibrary, it would have gone down. I wondered what was best: redundance in the electrical supply by having a large enough generator on stand-by all the time, or whether to have real books and newspapers which, in their robustness, would allow me to read. I had read some of the "real" Sunday NY Times as I was standing in the kitchen. Similarly, with my access to Microsoft Word denied me, I had turned to pencils and paper pads to write on.
I think a wise society would make provision for both systems, the electronic media and the print media, to continue to endure side by side. If not, everything will be outsourced and we will not have any paper necessaries when the plug gets pulled.
The question is and remains: how good is our infrastructure (particularly energy grids!) and how serious are we in maintaining it?

Even more questions come to mind, as we think of people who lightly describe our capitalistic system as "creative destruction", meaning new technologies breed new economic facts while the old ways fall out. Yet there is obviously more to it than that. If diesel locomotives had been prone to infrequent but disastrous outages, the Baldwin Steam Locomotive Company might yet have been in business today in some form.
The complexity of our lives is never easily summed up, for it is not static; it is dynamic, and it is fearsomely changing all the time. The challenge that faces us is a good and great challenge that calls for intelligence and wisdom.

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