The Ecology of Fiction Publication, part four. Eternity

There are some other advantages to self-publishing, both of which surpass anything available to species in the wild.

First, you can make changes in your book even after it is published. I haven’t tried this, but I assume what you would have to do is to take down your original book from Kindle, and replace it with files with the appropriate changes. Or updates. Your book would therefore never go out of date. In nature, once seeds have been dispersed, they cannot be called back. A tree might be able to make slight alterations in the structure of the seeds from one year to the next, but not much.

Second, your book will never go out of print so long as there are at least a couple of people buying it. Amazon has always provided this service to the community of readers. If a used copy of a book can be found anywhere, you can find it on Amazon, which links to the book stores or individuals who have these rare items. In nature, seeds eventually die.

My books, including the Kindle books that do not exist in print form, are my legacy to the future, aside from a little bit of money and a lot of love for my kids. After I have died, the only thing anyone in the world will know about me, apart from increasingly faded memories, will be my books. Somebody who does not know me might buy a copy of Rima and find out what I have learned about rain forests, for example. My legacy will also include my website, which, if the host gets paid, does not itself know whether I am alive or not.

Alas, Kindle books cannot be exactly what the author would want them to be. You have to be careful with non-standard text. I read T. C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain, in which he inserted some lines in Spanish. Spanish questions end with a question mark, but also begin with an inverted question mark. Boyle correctly included the inverted question mark. But Kindle always inserted a nothing-symbol (a zero with a slash through it) just before the inverted question mark.

In particular, illustrations tend to be extremely messed up in Kindle books. Every kindle book I have read, by other authors, have incomprehensible illustrations. My four Kindle novels have only one image in the book itself (not counting the cover, which is usually pretty good) and that is my author photo. No matter what I do, Kindle inserts it sideways. I can just pretend that it is because I am an avant-garde tradition-breaker.

But even with these faults, a website or a Kindle book (or any other book) is a better remnant to leave for future generations than a gravestone which can be fancy even for the meanest sons-of-bitches who ever lived. A good book, however, cannot be faked.

I will mention for the readers of this religion blog that, alas, this is the only kind of eternity that a person can expect. 

Killing Time? The Evolution of Hobbies

As I have continued reading Lonnie Aarssen’s book, What We Are, I ran across another interesting idea. He claims, and is probably correct, that human evolutionary psychology has been strongly influenced by the awareness that we are going to die. Many aspects of our cultures result from our responses to the certainty of our deaths.

One category of response is to create something that outlives us. Most of the estimated 90 billion people who have ever lived have not left any trace, other than perhaps a name on a record somewhere, that they ever existed. It doesn’t take many generations for this to happen. My great-grandfather exists now, as far as I am aware, of two photos from about 1890, a grave, and some DNA in his descendants.

 

But people who have had more money and power than did my great grandfather can do a lot more to create an enduring legacy. Rockefeller and Carnegie had endowments that are still giving awards to people. Simon Bolívar has a country named after him. These legacies create the false impression, while we are alive, that we will not die, and after we die, that we are still alive. In the Becky Hobbs/Nick Sweet musical Nanyehi, devoted to our ancestor Nancy Ward, the great Cherokee leader, the Nancy Ward character says, when you see the white swan’s wing, know that I am still alive. Of course, she isn’t, and there is remarkably little of her personal effects that can still be found (she died about 1822). But Rockefeller, Carnegie, Bolívar, and Nanyehi are still having an impact on the world.

Sir Francis Bacon noted that childless men put more into their legacies (he was thinking of creativity and intellect) than do men with big families precisely because they have no physical posterity. Wikipedia lists no children for Bacon. I have one child and two grandchildren, but this is below the world average.

The main motivation I feel in creating a legacy of writing is that I do not feel that I should hoard for myself the insights I have encountered in life. I want to share them.

Another category of response is to lose ourselves in hobbies. This allows us to ignore the fact that we will die. My Dad, for example, recorded country music on hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes, and spent countless hours documenting and organizing them. They have almost all disintegrated. I have his tape of country songs sung by our next door neighbor’s brother, Truitt. Are these hobbies just a way of killing time?

That is clearly one purpose of a hobby. But some of us try to turn our hobbies into legacies. I have thousands of photographs. They would be depressing if they were just a pile of pictures. But since 2007 all are digital, and I scanned the others. I labeled each photo with a descriptive name, and the year, so that the next generation of my family will know what each one was. Just in case they ever look at them. Of course, my daughter and family are in my photos also. You can see about a thousand of these photos (mostly of natural areas, not of me and my family) at my newly refurbished author website.

One of the best ways to create a unique legacy is to write a book. Major commercial publishers have published six of my books; I plan one more; all about popular science and history. I have also written articles, which are on various databases. My website is me, in the future. The books that I know I cannot publish through increasingly unstable commercial publishers will be, or so I plan, on Amazon. My tech-savvy son-in-law can probably find a few minutes a year to maintain my digital presence long after my passing. The essays on this blog, starting about 2008, will be available perhaps as long as the internet exists.

And that is pretty much what I do these days. I have no hobbies that are just for killing time. Time is precious, and I want to use it—all of it—to make the world better. This includes activities that maintain health and vigor, since I do not want all of my work to collapse if I have a stroke or something. And to keep me happy, since I do my best work as a writer and a grandfather by being happy. I hope to put a reasonable finish to my work and then, one day, I just won’t wake up.

Of course, my main legacy (both biological and cultural, even spiritual) will be my family, which so far is resisting extinction, and consists entirely of good people. World, you will be glad we were here.