I believe in mystery.
I believe in family.
I believe in being who I am.
I believe in the power of failure.
And I believe normal life is extraordinary.
This I believe.

I’m Jay Allison for This I Believe. Our essay this week was sent in by T. Susan Chang. Chang used to live in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. But she now lives with her husband and children on 20 acres in the small town of Levirate Massachusetts. Removed from the city to the country, from the fast to the slow, from the modern to the traditional, is reflected in her belief. Here’s Susan Chang with her essay for This I Believe.

I am a child of the digital age. But I believe in analog. I love the hiss and pop of vinyl and the black splotch in the corner when a movie changes reels. I enjoy the hushed, uneven ticking of a windup watch. I love hand writing. I believe in analog because it catches the imperfect traces left behind by human hands. Smudges and echoes that can’t disappear with the touch of a delete key.

I didn’t always feel this way. In 1985 my sister returned from Germany with a CD player, the first any of us had ever seen. And I marvel at the slick, featureless disc. I officially went digital in college when I bought my first computer. Mine was a Macintosh with two floppy drives and no hard drive. My boyfriend bought me one megabyte of RAM for my birthday and presented it to me in a jewel box.

Some years later, I found my husband on the Internet. It was 1997 and we were at the vanguard of the cyber dating scene. We swapped emails for a whole month before meeting, which most people found outlandish. We were on the cover of a book. I went on Oprah. We married in the year, left the city and found a house on realtor.com.

But something was changing in me. As the world went digital and the Matrix movies played to pack houses, I found myself drown to fountain pens, clock bound books and bargain priced LPs. One night, the fuses blew. And my husband and I had to choose between light and music for our one remaining outlet. We opted for music and sat close together in the darkness as the worn-out needle brought our Pepper Back from the dead, his saxophone weaving crack tapestries of sound.

Today I am a food writer. I live in the realm of the tactile which could be the last stronghold of the analog world. I think that taste, smell and touch are like the army of the resistance, hiding underground while their flashy audio visual siblings take the world by storm. Sometimes, my husband and I hold hands and scan the sky for constellations roughly sketching the seasons as they pass overhead. “Is it November already?” We asked each other when Orion rises into view. It’s a way of keeping time in exact at best. But it’s a better reminder than the digital alarm clock that wakes us each day at 5 a.m.

When my husband and I first met online a decade ago, we were digital, virtual and filled with instant uncertainty. But today, our actual lives are analog by nature. We live in the country where dial-up is standard and sometimes progress just put its feet up and takes a nap. We live our lives based on his best guess and mine.

Maybe the digital revolution like irrational number will never come to an end. But for me, there will always be a place the whisper, the crackle, the shades of modeled gray. For the sake of my own imperfect soul, I believe in analog.

T. Susan Chang with her essay for This I Believe. Chang has been listening to our series for a while when she decided it was time to quote, put her belief on paper. She drafted them though on her computer.

To find out about submitting your own essay, visit npr.org for details and to see all the essays in our series. For This I Believe, I’m Jay Allison.

This I Believe is independently produced by Jay Allison, Dan Gediman, John Gregory and Viki Merrick. Support for NPR comes from Prudential Retirement, sponsor of This I Believe. Prudential believes every worker can achieve a more secure retirement. Prudential Retirement, where believes matter.

Support for This I Believe comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

 


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