My External Storage

There's only so much that we can remember and carry in our brains. The rest are in "external storage"--books, papers, harddisks or CDs.

Leading a rather nomadic life these past few years has made it difficult for me to carry along with me all my possessions, especially my books. I consider my library to be my external storage. At the same time I am also accumulating new books, which if not properly managed, could start cluttering my room here in Jakarta.

So I try to pack books that I've read (and most likely won't refer to again) and bring them back with me to KL every few months. This is akin to archiving them to a remote site.

Sometimes I'd recall a fact or a line that I remember reading in a particular book and would immediately like to "reload" the passage into my mind. And I would often end up cursing myself when I realise that I had already sent it back home to KL. It is no longer "cached" in my memory and the "backup tapes" are already sent for remote archiving.

Trying to recall a quote from some book that is no longer in your immediate possession is almost like trying to " NFS mount" a UNIX file server across a bad network.

For example now I'm trying to recall a very interesting line from Carl Sagan's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Dragons of Eden which I read twenty years ago. I still have a yellowing paperback copy in my library back home in Subang Jaya.

Carl Sagan made an interesting comment about the uniqueness of books that lingers in my mind until now: A book is a block-like object, made from trees; it consists of flat thin sheets that help to increase its surface area; and then there's these strange black marks on them; and when you read these marks, you hear the author's voice (hello!) in your brain.

Of course he put it a lot more eloquently. But alas, I cannot recall the exact lines. Carl Sagan's sense of wonder and his infectious passion for knowledge and discovery inspired me a lot as a teenager. There are so many other authors and books that have played a great influence in my life. But my brain only contains tantalising pointer addresses to their contents.

Without books by my side, all I'm getting is the frustrating message: "NFS server not responding...".