I recently went to the annual book sale to support Shelter House. It took place in a big warehouse full of long table stacked with old, donated books. These kinds of events are dangerous for me. I already have too many books at home, and there’s some risk of my classroom library becoming mere overflow of what I can’t shelve at my house. At this particular book sale I was relatively conservative; only a few titles for me, including Isaac Asimov’s book on Shakespeare, a collection of Vonnegut nonfiction from the 1980s-90s that I’d never heard of, and a slipcover, two-book set of Lewis Thomas’s essays.

Leafing through Thomas’s The Lives of a Cell, published in 1974, I found “An Earnest Proposal,” which begins this way:

There was a quarter-page advertisement in the London Observer for a computer service that will enmesh your name in an electronic network of fifty thousand other names, sort out your tastes, preferences, habits, and deepest desires and match them up with opposite numbers, and retrieve for you, within a matter of seconds, and for a very small fee, friends. “Already,” it says, “it [the computer] has given very real happiness and lasting relationships to thousands of people, and it can do the same for you!”

Without paying a fee, or filling out a questionnaire, all of us are being linked in similar circuits, for other reasons, by credit bureaus, the census, the tax people, the local police station, or the Army. Sooner or later, if it keeps on, the various networks will begin to touch, fuse, and then, in their coalescence, they will start sorting and retrieving each other, and we will all become bits of information on an enormous grid.

Again, this was the early 1970s.

The essay goes on to be a kind of plea against nuclear war — too long to explain how he gets from one place to the other, better to just go read the essay — but I never tire of writers from much earlier years speculating on futures that amount to our own present, if not recent past.