—What in your opinion was the precursor of this technology?

Crane: Hee. Needle and thread?

Dahlie: Surely the precursor to this technology was tormented young people in Britain looking for ways to avoid punishment. I imagine that the wet ink effect was dreamed up by a bookish but clumsy engineer at a stationary company who was burdened by memories of being harassed at school for his poor handwriting.

D’Souza: The precursor of this technology I think is twofold. First off, I think the Washlet embodies the archetype of the clean running mountain stream. Like I think the early hominids, I think they wandered and hunted and gathered and all that and I think that eventually they came to the mountains and went up into them and they found the clear running streams. And of these they found of them pleasurable to drink, but also to wash themselves clean after answering the call of the wild. And the second precursor to the Washlet I think is the Japanese predilection for plastic robot type things with buttons and flashing lights that serve as surrogate friends in a dehumanized society. So we have the Washlet: it washes you, it is your friend.

Scibona: It seems to have replaced, to a greater or lesser degree, many things—dinner conversation, bridge, listening to your sister play the piano in the parlor, letter writing: the appetite for all these things was flattened when the television was turned on. But I think the closest technological precursor to the television is the novel, which, oddly, was denounced in the early days of its popularity in the same tones that television is denounced today, as an opiate.

Novels weren’t always consumed silently, as today; they used to be read aloud, to the family, after supper, by the light of whale oil lamps, while snow pelted the windowpanes—that is, in a way very like television is watched at its most cozy and reassuring times. Like many American readers, I moved backwards from the descendant to the precursor: television had made me sick, and the novel, whose cultural place television had usurped, was the cure.

Around the tenth grade, I read my first adult novel. An aunt in Seattle had recommended it. I admired her. I had told her I had the blues, and she gave me a list of novels. My brother and I had inherited a black and brown polyester-upholstered couch from an uncle who had died. I lay in it, reading by the light of a bare bulb in a ceramic fixture behind my head. Felt pennants celebrating all of Ohio’s major baseball and football franchises were tacked to the walls. It was a Saturday morning.

From downstairs, the television entreated through the heating register; I got up and muffled it with a copy of the Columbia Encyclopedia that my grandmother had given me. Then I lay down again, and I read all day long. I must have stopped for dinner and then gone back to the book.

Sometime that night, I took a minute’s break to go downstairs and get a glass of water from the tap inside the refrigerator. The water was incredibly cold. It seemed to have a sweetness specific to water that I had missed in fifteen years of drinking from the very same tap. This was only one of a thousand lucid sensations that were flooding my consciousness at that moment and that, in so doing, expanded its volume in an unprecedented way.

I was awake. I had never been more awake. All of my senses were open and avid.

I knew that it was reading the novel that had done this to me. I had heard the rumor, mostly from television, that some people regarded reading literature as a sacred act, but I had never known first-hand what the fuss was. I had spent my whole life asleep and hadn’t known it until I had been woken up by reading.