paper spine worn thin
old words shift in quiet rooms
answers wait in dust
I can’t remember the last thing I searched for online. Not because I don’t search — I do, every day, like everyone else — but because the act itself has no weight. You type, you click, you skim, you close the tab. By the end of the day, it’s all dissolved into static, like the faint hiss of a radio left on in another room.
What I do remember are the things I’ve returned to instead.
On my desk in Basel sits an old paperback. Its cover is frayed, the corners soft and bent, the kind of book that feels like it has lived through more than one owner. The pages are yellowed, the font a little too small, but the smell is familiar — the dry, dusty smell of paper that has soaked up years of silence.
I’ve been rereading the basics lately. Not the modern interpretations or the glossy summaries that condense ideas into something quick, but the roots themselves. Darwin’s books, with their patient observations of pigeons and finches. The sentences move slowly, circling, repeating — but in that slowness, there’s a kind of clarity. You begin to see how science wasn’t born in bursts of genius but in long afternoons of looking closely at what was already there.
The same with the first biology texts I once thought too simple. I read them now not for information, but for grounding. There’s a strange comfort in reading how life begins, how cells divide, how breath itself is exchanged. These things haven’t changed, but the act of returning changes me.
The internet doesn’t give me that. Search engines offer answers, but answers are cheap. What I’ve come to want isn’t an answer, but a depth. And depth doesn’t come from constant searching. It comes from returning.
In Basel, during a wet spring, I would take long walks along the Rhine. The river was always the same, and yet never the same. The water moved differently with the weather, with the light, with my own mood. I never tired of it. Every walk was a kind of rereading.
One evening in Shinjuku I felt the same thing. I was staying in a hotel above a convenience store, a narrow room with a single lamp and a window that caught the neon from across the street. I had a book with me I’d already read twice, one of those slim novels that seems almost too simple at first. I opened it again, not because I needed to, but because the streets outside felt overwhelming. I read the first chapter, and the words were different. Or maybe I was. Either way, they slowed me down, grounded me in the way a search result never could.
In Slovenia, the same lesson came another way. Summers there stretched endlessly when I was a child, but as an adult, I returned with less time. One afternoon, I sat under a fig tree my father had planted from a branch he once carried back from the Adriatic. I watched the way the leaves shifted in the breeze, the way the light changed shape as the day moved. Nothing extraordinary happened. But in that stillness, I understood something I had missed: peace isn’t found in novelty. It’s found in noticing what’s already here.
When I think about the last thing I searched for online, I can’t recall it. But I can recall that fig tree, the smell of the soil, the sound of cicadas in the distance. I can recall the lines of Darwin circling the shape of an idea, or the simple biology diagrams I once skipped over as too obvious. I can recall the steady flow of the Rhine and the neon glow on a Shinjuku window. These are the searches that last — the ones that require no browser.
Sometimes I think the internet is like a broken faucet. It gushes endlessly, spraying information in every direction, but leaves you unsatisfied, still thirsty. Returning to basics — the book, the river, the tree — is like drinking from a well. Clear. Slow. Enough.
I don’t mean to abandon technology. Maps are useful. So are train timetables, weather forecasts, and messages from people far away. But the deeper search — the one that matters — doesn’t happen in a search bar. It happens when you circle back to the foundations, the things that have been waiting quietly all along.
That’s why lately, instead of chasing the next answer online, I’ve been rereading old books. Cooking simple meals. Listening to records that skip slightly at the edges. Walking paths I’ve walked a hundred times before. Each return reveals something different, not because the thing has changed, but because I have.
And that, I think, is the only real search worth making: not for more, but for enough.
life 