When I was young, I was obsessed with the film Chariots of Fire. I don’t really know why. I wasn’t a runner, though I briefly flirted with sprinting during the heady days of my love affair with the movie. Perhaps I was enchanted with the era. Perhaps I was stirred by the music. Perhaps it was simply that it is such a good film. Whatever the reason, I watched it over and over (on Betamax, and if you don’t know what that is, look it up!), and I wrote quotations from the movie on note cards and taped them up around my bed. I listened to the soundtrack on my walkman (something else for young readers to look up), and I made my dear friend Kristen take pictures of me running in the surf at Rehoboth beach.
I was so obsessed with the stories that weave together in the film that I wanted to know more. Back in the early 1980s, the way to know more was to go to the library. There was no internet. No Google. No Wikipedia. I went to the public library and used first the card catalog and then the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature to track down information about Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams. I still remember seeing Abrahams’ name on a list of record holders in a reference book and feeling that I’d discovered something astounding, like the Rosetta Stone or Atlantis.
All of this research took time, a considerable amount of time, and it was an experience that involved physically searching, as opposed to typing a term and then clicking a link or two. I had to find the right catalogs, flip through cards and pages, and then walk to another part of the library, where I took books off the shelf, turned more pages, and squinted at fine print. The research involved physical labor, of a sort, and all this effort made what I learned stick with me. I owned the information because I worked so hard to find it.
I recently watched the film again, for the first time in many years, with my children. I thought it would seem dated to them or even dull, but to my delight, they liked it very much, and, like I did thirty years ago, they wanted to know more. “What happened to Aubrey? What happened to Jennie?” Without even moving from the comfy spot where we were snuggled up to watch the film, I woke up my laptop and typed these questions into search boxes. Answers popped up instantly. How amazing! How wonderful! Children have questions, and answers appear as if by magic.
But also, how sad.
“Search” means something different now, something fast and powerful, yes, but also something just a little soulless. There is no journey that leads to owning what is found. Knowledge seems like something that is generated effortlessly by search engines. It is not something that we laboriously craft or that we struggle to seek out.
However, I must confess that while writing this post, I googled Harold Abrahams to make sure I was spelling his name correctly, and I was grateful that I did not have to finger through a card catalog to get that information. What’s more, that search serendipitously turned up a YouTube video of Abrahams—truly extraordinary! My local public library in the early 80s did not have a film archive: there was no amount of labor a kid working on her own could have undertaken to get access to that film. And remember how I felt about finding Abrahams’ name on a list–think of the triumph and joy I would have felt had I found this video, available to me now only because of the internet.
So, in the end, I think my point is this: it is wonderful that so much material is so readily available, but something is lost when the search involves little more than clicking. I hope all my readers will find ways, at least now and then, to relish a difficult search. To work hard. To turn some pages. To navigate stacks and touch knowledge. For it is the labor of the search that really teaches us something and makes us own what we learn.