My Fragile Memories: A War Between Technology and Good Writing

On a solitary summer evening in 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge fell asleep while reading about Xanadu, the summer capital of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan. He awoke, three hours later, with “a distinct recollection of the whole” vision, and quickly wrote the poem we know today as Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment.

This may seem like an uneventful moment of literary history, but to me — an aspiring writer — it is its most thrilling moment. Every writer yearns for an experience like this — for a ‘spontaneous overflow of emotion’.

But sometimes I wonder: if Coleridge had lived in the 21st century instead, would he have forgotten his epic verse a lot faster?

I often say that we were the last generation of kids to go out and play every evening. We were the last generation of kids to abandon machinery to just go out and play hide-and-seek at 5 o’clock sharp, every day, without fail. When I came back home a few hours later (rather grudgingly), I would curl up in my bed and make a journal entry in my small, battered book. Back in the day, I had things to write about.

“Cathy said something funny today.”
“Maria and I played a prank on our French teacher last week.”