Bach better on bedsprings

[whorton@whale.st.usm.edu (James Edward Whorton Jr)]

The question of what Bach is better on reminds me of the question of what
is lost when you read, say, _Anna Karenina_ online off your computer
screen instead of out of your book.  Something tells me that the
experience is in fact substantially different, reading off a screen--just
as it's different depending on the physical condition of the book.  When I
think about a really good book I've read, I know my memory of the copy
itself is mixed up in there.  For example I can't think much about Moby
Dick without experiencing a tactile recollection of the paperback I
encountered it in, which was old with pages falling out, and had been
partly chewed by a dog, and got drenched midway through my reading, so
that by the time I finished it was warped and puckered. 

Yes, the physical medium is somehow tied up with the ideal object--the
bundle of pages and the novel itself, or the specific recording of a
specific performance on some instrument, and the fugue itself--and the
relationship between the two is mysterious.  Folks who say that reading
off your computer screen is not really reading, though, or is somehow
a lesser kind of reading, seem to somehow miss the point.  And similarly
with choice of a musical instrument.  A harpsichord has a different
presence in the world than a piano, and the difference does signify,--but
both are means of getting an idea across, and in that sense they're sort
of irrelevant.

And this is what I love about the vacuum cleaner anecdote, and what I take
to be the moral/aesthetic freight of it.