Lately I’ve been imagining my epitaph. “Here lies Paul Willcott. Tormented to death by Microsoft Word and Outlook.” Or, if I my passing should merit a story in a newspaper, a headline might say, “Man dies immediately after achieving reasonable mastery of Word and Outlook.” There will be no such story, of course; failure to get control of word processing will prevent me from having a newsworthy life. And if in the unlikely case that I had gotten control of it, my final thoughts would be, “what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”.

Perhaps you’d like to know where all this kvetching comes from. I’ll tell you. Some time ago, I got the idea that I should write a certain book. A travel narrative cum memoirs and ruminations was laid out in my mind just waiting for me to put it on paper, thereby offering the world a bit of entertainment and making me feel like I had done something worthy. One problem. Between my excellent brain and the printed word lay the computer.

So instead of writing a book these past many months, I’ve been doing battle with electronic enemies, such as the formatting problems that line up against me when I attempt to paste bits of one document into another document or, God forbid, into an email. “Pasting” is not what happens when you instruct a computer to paste. Not at all. Pasting is what you do in scrapbooks; you clip a paragraph or two, put paste on the back of it, and set it down on another piece of paper. The source document and the destination document are one. When my computer “pastes,” it often turns the order of the source document into chaos. What shows up on the destination page has only passing similarity to the source. Inimical forces so abstruse they have yet to be named have their way; margins, spacing, indentation, fonts, and more get changed willy-nilly. This happens mostly when I’m in a hurry, which leads me to suspect that computers have a chip devoted to perversity.

And the “paste” command is but one of many nasty tricks computers play when processing words. Take changing line spacing, for example. Say you want to change a single-spaced 4539-word document to double spaced. Yeah well, select it all and touch that little command arrow and you get something on your screen that is a cross between a Rorschach image and what the cat vomited on the new couch. I think there is a very good chance that the computer is an instrument the devil has devised to make us crazy and mean and to prevent extremely talented writers like me from actually writing.

Beyond the step-by-step frustrations, there is a larger objection. Computers give geeks power over normal people. It’s the dark underbelly of the enlightenment. Science and technology are OK in their place, but they should not be allowed to crowd out such things as inspiration, creativity, art, intuition, and mystery. An example: “sick” and “healthy” are often applied to morally objectional behavior. Those terms work perfectly well when used for conditions like Covid or leprosy, but attempting to dispose of state secrets by flushing them down White House toilets and stopping them up is not “sick” – it’s just really bad, arguably criminal, behavior. (Well, maybe that’s not a good example.)

Here’s another larger concern. Computers have made it possible for people with no discernible talent for turning language into art to be “writers.” There was a time when novels were the province of genius. Dickens and others wrote sublimely artistic long ones in longhand – in ink – and published them a chapter every week or so as they were completed. Dickens’s manuscripts show few corrections other than a word crossed out and replaced here and there. Dickens is often on my mind as I tussle with Bill Gates. Of course, Dickens was an author, not a “writer,” not one of us creatures who were magically created by the mere act of buying a laptop and an internet connection.

Trying to cow Word and Outlook into submission was exactly the kind of thing I wanted not to do in my old age. In college, I rejected studying anything the least bit vocational. I went out of my way not to pass by the buildings where business administration or engineering were taught. I’ve always known that when arthritis began to be a problem and staying up late lost its allure, I would finally get around to serious reading in sustained bursts. I would enjoy hour after hour of Bach and Handel. And I would take walks in some sylvan glade during which I would think deep thoughts about the meaning of life instead of being bedeviled with why an email bounced because of a “syntax error in the address” that I had copied and pasted into the blank.