Daily magic

I'm reading a book about time travel, magical mirrors, a mysterious mansion, and fairy peoples.¹  I may or may not post an essay reviewing it one of these days, but that's not my point.  My point is that I'm reading it on my Kindle. 

So I finished a chapter, pressed a button, saw a tiny green light appear, and watched the screen dissolve into an abstract pattern.  Then the thought hit me over the head.  Thirty years ago, holding such a small device in my hand would have caused my heart to pound.  I myself would have been flirting with the occult.

When I was growing up, I was surrounded by modern technology that also seemed wondrous.  As an illustration of the word "magic" found in my dictionary puts it:  "A hundred years ago television would have seemed to be magic."  

But when I was a kid, the "magic" was magic only at first glance.  Television, automobiles, telephones, radio, airplanes -- all seemed wondrous, all seemed magical.  But only to the incurious.  If you wanted to learn about them, each modern wonder could be explained to a teenager of average intelligence. 

As I began writing this essay, I recalled a book from my early teens, a book from which I remember reading a chapter each night in bed, the way some people read the Bible:  The Modern Wonder Book of Knowledge, subtitled "The thrilling stories of twentieth-century industry, science, nature, transportation, communication, and other marvels of the world."   And -- lo and behold -- I discovered that not only do I still own the book, but was able to locate it hiding in one of my more obscure bookcases.  Copyright 1949, affordable in hard cover for $4.95 ($48.41 in today's dollars), thank you.

The book has clear text, written in high school level English, with diagrams, charts and photographs.  The book is not a technical manual.  You won't be able to build a telephone after reading the chapter on telephones.  But you are given a good, practical understanding of how a telephone works (with an excellent photograph of a long row of intent, seated women: "long-distance operators at a modern switchboard").  A telephone wasn't magic; it was an example of modern science.
 
An automobile was every bit as wondrous to me as the telephone, but a large number of boys in my high school could dismantle a car's engine, clean the parts, replace defective parts, and rebuild the engine so that it was better than new. Now an auto engine is one big computer.

But what do I know about a Kindle?  What does a high school kid, the kind of kid who used to take auto shop, know?  What does anyone know, outside the engineers and technical workers who actually design and assemble the product.  The Kindle's a small, thin rectangle.  It obviously contains a rechargeable battery.  It has some sort of memory device -- is it similar to a computer hard drive?  An integrated circuit board?  It downloads books from "the cloud" (well, from Amazon, actually), charges my Visa card for them, and stores several thousand of them inside its slim, elegant frame.  I can return books to "the cloud" for additional storage if I wish.  By touching the screen, I can thumb my way through books, page by page or chapter by chapter.  I can "highlight" passages for future reference.  I can obtain instant dictionary definitions of words I don't understand.

I haven't a clue how it works.  Not a clue!  If anything went wrong -- the way a kid's Ford might have gone wrong in the 1950's -- I couldn't begin to fix it.  I couldn't even open it up to look at its gizzards.  Nor could anyone else in town.  If you went into Radio Shack and told them your Kindle needed repairs -- or a tune-up -- they'd think you were insane.

My point, then, is that a Kindle -- which serves only as one example of a vast number of products we rely on daily -- might as well be "magic":

the art of producing a desired effect or result through the use of incantation or various other techniques that presumably assure human control of supernatural agencies or the forces of nature.

The Kindle does not strictly fit the dictionary definition of magic only because I trust the assurance of its manufacturer that its operation rests on well accepted laws of nature -- not incantations -- that they have cannily bent to achieve the "desired effects" of this small and wondrous device.

I've owned my Kindle for a couple of years, now.  It still amazes me, but no more so than I'm amazed by an iPhone, a digital camera, my PC, or most of the other so-called necessities of my daily life.  I know they're all based on natural phenomena, insofar as we've all gotten used now to considering quantum mechanics a "natural phenomenon."

But, let's face it.  They're really magic.
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¹Catherine Fisher, Obsidian Mirror (Dial Books 2013).