PERSONAL NARRATIVE

After the Quake: From Paperbacks to Aftershocks

The March 11 Earthquake/Tsunami/Nuclear Disaster as seen from a Tokyo classroom

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Each spring here in Tokyo, I teach William Golding’s dark fantasy of British schoolboys stranded on a desert island, Lord of the Flies, to grade 10 students for whom time is digital. These students’ first memories may date from Y2K; the Internet nursed them, email raised them, and social networking sites shepherd them into young adulthood. While their analog parents and teachers still think in 25-year generations, Moore’s Law of increasingly efficient technologies plus accelerated marketing cycles mean these kids are hardwired for revolutionary change every couple of years.

But however you measure the passing of time, the nature of people hasn’t changed, and Golding’s human fable of good and evil is still worth studying.

So they close their laptops reluctantly and look doubtful as I pass out little green and yellow paperback editions of the novel. I can’t blame them: these classroom copies are musty from school bag and locker, and semesters spent tangled in gym strips. These dead-tree books must seem like a relic of a time quickly passing and best forgotten. Unlike an iPad or MacBook Air, they have not been forged from single…