The first tomato (Cherokee Purple) of the year.

Change happens, with or without our participation, in the cultural blink of an eye. Consider that it has only been 12 years since I stopped wearing a jacket to Friday night dinner at Hunter’s Cafe in Sweetwater. It’s something I recalled when a recent farm volunteer expressed her discomfort with wearing anything but sweatpants and T-shirt to college classes: “It would make me feel too uncomfortable to ‘dress’ up.”

No turning back, I guess. Even more Quixotic would be to arrest the digital flood of information that too often buries good writing. Although ‘flood’ may not be the best description; a flood leaves damage and evidence of its passing. The digital word, this most ephemeral of ephemera, this nontangible, unable to hold content for longer than the next click, diffusing into the ether with a fading screen, is my chief concern.

Newspapers, pamphlets, magazines, journals, quarterlies, newsletters, letters, ephemera of all sorts, have almost entirely disappeared from our lives, leaving behind only the debris of seldom-read mass-produced circulars to be dumped into the nearest landfill. The digital world has completely replaced the regular timetable of the printed with an endless flood of content, curated or not, in an inbox that vanishes from the mind, even if read, before the next click of Refresh.

The humble church bulletin (or any newsletter from a community group) is now replaced by a Facebook page, or a QR code. The nature of that particular ephemera was that it lingered in your life, the bulletin floating around on your car seat or countertop, a visual reminder that someone was sick, dead, or getting married.

Or ponder the endless stream of well-curated writing on the online platform Substack. It’s a venue where smart and intellectually curious people craft some of the best essays to be found, but the pieces are written for the digital world, amid the tsunami of information and amusement. They have no permanence. They flood in and wash out into nothing, given life only briefly by our distracted eyes, the authors already busy creating new “content” before the last article has disappeared under the sedimented layers of bytes.

Here on the farm, we still subscribe to several print journals and receive newsletters from those dwindling number of organizations that bother with paper. It may seem too obvious to say, but the thing about receiving a copy of Local Culture (Front Porch Republic) or the wonderful Farming Magazine (Kline family) in the mailbox is that those publications linger in our lives. I may sit down and read it cover to cover and toss it aside or stack it by my reading chair. A month later Cindy may pick it up and read an article or essay. “Did you read the piece by Kunstler?” she asks.

“Hmm, remind me,” I’ll say. She does and I realize I need to reread it. Or I pick up the year-old copy of Farming Magazine in the bathroom and read the series on growing potatoes, again. Having printed matter at hand encourages conversations, fosters relationships that endure far longer than those engendered by the sharing of a link by email. Print is, literally, durable. The online world promotes a restless consumption, whose writings are instantly out of date. We don’t go back to the inbox, because it is already jammed anew. What is read is then gone — out of sight and out of mind — with the blink of a screen.

You won’t discover a scrapbook of digital links put together in an old trunk by your grandmother, a QR code for the funeral service bulletin for your grandfather in a file or a book. You won’t go into the bathroom and find a collection of essays in cloud storage nestled on top of the toilet. This world is ephemeral; ephemera belonged to another age.

We no longer exist in a continuum where time and custom are married. Today’s culture is all too immediate and of no lasting duration. Our contactless future is now. So, shuffle over here in your bunny slippers and hit Delete, then Refresh. A world of fresh distraction awaits.

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Reading this weekend: The Epistles of Horace (translated by David Ferry)