The Ruins of Nostalgia 46

We felt nostalgic for the abandoned dream of the paperless office. In the

paperless office, it was said, all communication was going to be clean of trace,

stored in metal. The latent urge to drift in individual sheets would be disciplined,

forests would remain uncut. Work would be orderly, armored, inexorable; the

fragility of organic matter would, at last, be overturned, in the dream of the

paperless office.   *   We felt nostalgic for the paperless office, yes. But what we

had forgotten was that because the term “paperless office” was made up

primarily of the words “paper” and “office,” what we had actually been

imagining all along was an office made of paper, a dream of endlessly available

surfaces we would fill with the inexhaustible ink of our calligraphic minds. In the

office made of paper, we would work in the midst of wall-size tablets of paper

whose depths upon depths of blankness were not at all blank, but latent

with the inkling that some of our beautiful ideas might be prized out of the

clouds of our minds and be transcribed, be realized. We would write exposed,

ensconced in the delicate constancy of our disconsolate thoughts, for the eyes of

those we invited in to our paper(less) office.   *   Like many dreams that have had

to be abandoned, the paperless office floated off somewhere, only to lodge in

the collective shelving of ideas whose time might or might not ever come. But

because it was an active imagining we had passively participated in, we too felt

wistful for the abandoned dream of the paperless office, and its unrealized

potential. It made us think of our own unrealized potential . . . of how it might

have been possible, at one time, to have been a paperless office made of paper,

etc. The offices are always open in the ruins of nostalgia.