A book on a bus

The other day I had occasion to travel by bus. I made sure I brought a book to read because the trip would take several hours. I didn’t buy a newspaper because I didn’t want newsprint all over my hands.

I did a lot of reading when I traveled to and from college on mass transit through four of the five boroughs of New York City back in the day. Just as you never forget how to ride a bicycle, reading on the bus was no problem.

Standing out like a sore thumb was.

I was the only person on the bus who was reading ink on paper. Everyone else, who wasn’t napping, held a small electronic device. One was checking phone messages; another was making phone calls. One was listening to an iPod; another was watching a video. One was playing games; another was texting. There was even a guy with a normal size laptop computer, who was watching something on the screen. He wasn’t writing or surfing the net, but was watching something that had been downloaded.

I couldn’t help feeling like a dinosaur because I was reading an actual book printed on real paper. Each time I turned a page, I could almost hear someone snickering, “Look at that old guy reading a book.” Of course, no one actually said that. Each person was too busy with his or her own electronic device.

It suddenly dawned on me how shortsighted the premise of Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451 was. The title refers to the temperature at which paper burns and the story predicted a future where books were banned. It seems to me that can never happen now, because “books” have gone digital and are now just electrons running around inside electronic devices.