Visit enchanting Verna
One of the greatest things about the internet is the opportunity if affords us to revisit things we thought lost forever.
A line from a poem runs through our heads, and we can’t place it. Before Google, it could drive us stark raving mad. Now, we can look it up instantly and feel the “aha!” of blessed relief.
Same for song lyrics. Same for old performances; I’ve seen many clips on You Tube featuring ballet dancers from the distant past, especially performances I saw as a child and loved but never thought to be able to see again. Even if it’s only a grainy and jerky image on a small computer screen, it almost has the effect of Proust’s madeleine.
And now I made another find. When I was a child I used to read a fair amount of science fiction, almost always short stories. One that stuck in my mind very powerfully early on was about a man who wanted to escape his humdrum existence. He went to a travel agent, and there he was shown a secret travel folder that only the special and select few ever got to see. It featured a place called “Verna,” a magical Utopia where all cares would disappear. He bought a ticket and…
Well, I don’t need to tell you the rest of the story. You can read it yourself online, if you care to.
Whether you enjoy the story or think it ho-hum, all I can say is that for me, finding it again was almost as wonderful as going to Verna itself.
[NOTE: When I Googled the story’s author, Jack Finney, I discovered for the first time that he was also the creator of The Body Snatchers, on which the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” was based.]
Thank you 🙂
I too had read this in High School and forgotten it until your article.
Thanks for reminding me of it. I could relate to the would be traveler back then and still can.
By the way, Google pulls up a html copy of the story. If you want to read the whole story, pull down the pdf copy.
Before Google, there was the loose network of people like me who have minds like attics, full of charming but generally useless things. We tended to know each other, and often fell in love with reference librarians. We lay in wait for people to suggest playing party games like trivial pursuit or jeopardy.
I am becoming obsolete, which should distress me no end. But I of all people love search engines. I would wither without them now. When wondering whether the Charlotte Bobcats had a previous incarnation somewhere else, I used to have to run my list of other minds-like-attics, or wait until one came into my area. Now I can just know, immediately.
Finney also wrote “Time and Again”, one of my favorite science fiction stories. It’s a romance, too!
Oh, we are talking Jack Finney – his Time and again (the sequel is not quite up there) was the first essentially New York book that gave me a feeling of the city. I fell in love. I wanted to move there and then.
In 3 years afterwards my wish was granted – and I lived here ever since, for 17 years now.
In March I was showing the city to a first-time visitor, well-traveled guy (he lived in Ukraine, Malta, Israel, Canada), and I went on my favorite Finney route (from Dakota down to Grammercy) When we were walking around the park and I went on telling the stories of all the surrounding buildings he stopped and said – I read about it…somewhere here lived a guy who time-traveled in the Victorian Mew York!
“Before Google, there was the loose network of people like me who have minds like attics, full of charming but generally useless things.”
As I’ve often said – I have a mind like a steel trap, it’s just rusted shut.
Myself I can recall processes well, it’s been over 10 years now since I sat in college and listened to how a networking algorithm called “sliding windows” and “go-back-n” worked, what the tradeoffs were, and all sorts of other process like information (I’ve never once used the information). I can tell you how a microwave works from a hardware point of view to how it physically heats the food. I can discuss ballistics on projectiles, wave mechanics through different mediums, and just an absolute huge amount of process type information from a myriad different fields – much of it I only heard or read once and maybe as much as 20 to almost 30 years ago (I’m 34 so that goes back to fairly young).
I still can’t tell you what my cell phone number is and I couldn’t tell you who played in a movie I watched last night. In fact most trivia type of information you can forget it.
A certain part of that is being dyslexic – for instance I can tell you all the numbers in my cell number but I can’t put them in order – and part of it is that I just have a god given talent at remembering certain things. I recall telephone numbers by patterns on the keyboard and how I move my thumb on the keypad (which is a process, not rote memorization). One of these days I’m going to have to dial my cell phone number enough to learn it.
I’ve also found that people with high retention rates usually remember one or the other ways better too – it just so happens that I’m gifted in the process way and have a learning disability in the other which makes the difference even more apparent in my case. This also caused me no end of trouble through most of my schooling, few understood dyslexia and couldn’t fathom that I could recall somethings so well and yet not others – it *had* to be simple lazy.
Thankfully with google now I almost never have to recall simple facts (even more true being the type of software engineer I am). I’m paid fairly well to design simple processes for difficult tasks and then many times others go do the grunt work or I can easily look up the grunt work on google. If I didn’t have google (or something similar – archie, veronica, yahoo, or whatever incarnation I used at one time) I do not know how I would have gotten along as student let alone a professional, I suppose I would have had a 1000 book library in my office 🙂
Thank you for sharing the sentiment and the story – I really enjoyed it.
The web has enabled me to improve my library – but there are two tales of this.
I read nearly continuously when I am not at work, especially during the time I was deployed with the USAF.
In the early 2000’s I took some public domain ebooks along with some pulp novels not in the public domain. I read “The Count of Monte Cristo” entirely on my palm pilot, along with some Doc Savage, The Shadow and Tarzan. Unfortunately, Conde Nast owns the copyright to the pulp novels. They are no longer available on the net (I would pay for the collection, but not too much) – Conde Nast hasn’t figured a way to monetize the collection so it isn’t available.
Along the way, I found Baen Books. Baen is a Science Fiction publisher who has been offering almost every book they publish as an unencrypted ebook – readable on a variety of platforms. When I deployed in 2007, I took my Baen collection. Today, I cannot remember the last time I bought a paper sci-fi book.
Perhaps I will buy a Kindle – the palm is obsolete and I won’t be able to replace it when it dies.
Great story, Neo. I had not read it before. I found an online copy of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” once. Not good for office productivity!
Instugator
Thanks for the tip about the Baen Library. I checked it out and have already downloaded three novels.
Thanks a lot!
AVI said:
Before Google, there was the loose network of people like me who have minds like attics, full of charming but generally useless things.
In a discussion at work, I blurted out some piece of trivia, only to have one of my long-suffering co-workers note: “Paul, you are a mine of useless information.”.
😉
Ah, another childhood favorite returned to me. Thanks.
One of things about the Verna story when you read it is that it calls up, unconsciously, the tone used by Rod Sterling in his intros and codas to The Twilight Zone.