Free A Writer's Life by Gay Talese Page B

a springed resistance that I find fatiguing after more than an hour of typing. So in the late 1970s, motivated by a mild case of digital arthritis, I purchased a pair of IBM electrics that offered more speed with a softer touch; they also came equipped with a number of interchangeable print wheels that provided me with the time-wasting opportunity to dally over my phrases and sentences as I rewrote them in diversified fonts that I believe often reflected my changing moods, ranging from the serenity of “Script” to the assertiveness of “Boldface.”
    In 1988, influenced by writer friends who claimed that it is easier to write when using a word processor, I acquired two Macintosh 512Ks at a discount price through my publisher and subscribed to introductory courses in the new technology offered by various young college-educated people who made house calls and seemed to have no career ambitions of their own.
    Within a few months, however, my eyesight seemed to be fading (I could no longer read the baseball batting averages printed in agate type on sports pages), and while I initially attributed this condition to my advancing years, I also began to blame it on the hours during which I had sat facing the flickering glare of the Macintosh 512K computer screens. These screens were also quite small, having a viewable area of six by seven and a half inches, not much larger than a postcard. When, after acclimating myself to my first pair of prescription glasses, I
still
had difficulty reading my words on the screen, I decided to trade in my 512Ks for the big-screen Macs that were then being heavily advertised in newspapers. But the computer-store managers I approached refused to give me any trade credit for my 512Ks. These machines had zero retail value, I was told by one man, who added that consumers had begun to see them as obsolete about two years ago, and he doubted that there were people around still using them.
    Angry at myself for having been so unaware and so unwise as to launch myself into the computer age with antiquated merchandise that only months before I had considered myself lucky to buy wholesale from my publisher’s no doubt shady distributor, I now stubbornly refused to invest in new equipment unless I received some financial compensation for my supposedly worthless pair of 512Ks. And thus they remained untouched on my desks in New Jersey and New York for most of the next three years, collecting dust.
    But my resistance to upgrading myself also concerned me. Often I sawmyself as a Luddite, an old-fashioned, stagnating reactionary—and I particularly felt this way when I was in the company of fellow writers who raved aloud about their newly acquired “state-of-the-art” computers that were practically
writing
their books for them; even my wife, with whom I presumably shared a time-honored belief in the enduring value of slowly evolving, painstaking literary labor, was now smitten with the speed and facile efficiency of the cutting-edge technology available in her office and that she herself embraced with the devotedness and blithe sense of discovery often associated with late-in-life religious converts.
    The corporation also provided her with extra computers and printers for her home use at night and on weekends, requiring that we install an additional telephone line in each house. Whenever she was traveling around the country or overseas—to sales conferences in Florida or Arizona in wintertime, or to European book fairs in autumn—she toted within her carry-on luggage a slim and stylishly elongated laptop that, when I first saw it, I realized had a screen considerably larger than that of my Macintosh 512K. But her journeying laptop and the corporate equipage that cluttered her reading rooms in New York and New Jersey were much too complicated and sophisticated for me to borrow, not being manufactured by Macintosh and, in any case, beyond my patience and the limited technical