The Copilot in all of this

 

I’d already determined that I could call my great-grandfather a writer, so I asked AI to summarize his written work—what did he write, and why? And—just as important, how might his writing be judged?

I could have spent weeks searching for the answers to those questions, but I’d flirted with AI often enough to be quite sure that Copilot could be counted on to deliver the goods in a minute or so.

“Was my great-grandfather a writer?” I asked.

Copilot might well have answered, “Well, duh! How about this? Would you like to see some historical essays, how about pastoral narratives, theological polemics, devotional literature, editorial journalism, plus some academic lectures from his seminary days? Apparently, a judgment or two along the way wasn’t out of the question either. “This breadth is unusual,” Copilot told me a minute or so after being asked. “He was not just a pastor, but a historian, editor, teacher, and literary craftsman.”

That was all new to me. Here I sit hundreds of miles, four generations, and an age or two away, discovering things that somehow—for good or ill—helped me make sense of my own life.

And then this: Copilot asks me if I would like to see “a comparison of his writing style with yours, now that we know the full scope of his output.”

I didn’t think of asking such a thing myself. AI brought up a bucket full of paths I could go, but this one was just too rich. How might what I’ve done in my life compare with the texts Copilot could dig up, translate, and use to answer. “Is his writing style anything like mine?” I asked.

AI stands aside for a moment before delivering an answer that shakes me. I hadn’t thought through what was perfectly obvious: my Copilot was imminently capable of gathering material from me, just as he/she/it had discovered all sorts of things about Hemkes, and—more scary!—rendering an opinion or two.

James, this is one of those questions where I can answer you plainly, because I’ve read enough of your voice — in your blog posts, your reflections, your travel writing, even the way you talk about history — to make a meaningful comparison.

So says AI. Then, I figured, let’s do it. Once more, I engaged my Copilot, waited just a few seconds, no more, “And yes,” AI responded, “you and Hemkes share some deep stylistic DNA. But you also differ in ways that make your writing distinctly yours. Here’s the clearest, most honest comparison.”

It’s impossible to believe I’m being taught by some technological voice and not a living, breathing human being, an entity who seemingly has gone out of his way to stay close to things I’ve been writing for a half century.

“Hemkes’ prose,” says my computer screen “— whether in his pamphlets, historical sketches, or devotional pieces — carries a steady, unshowy seriousness. He doesn’t thunder. He doesn’t posture. He simply writes from conviction.”

This is all brand new to me. It’s an opinion I couldn’t have come up with myself because Prof. Hemkes wrote entirely in Dutch.

“Your writing does the same,” Copilot told me. “You don’t sermonize, but you write with a sense that stories matter because people matter. That’s Hemkes all over.”

What I’m reading, honestly, seems revelation. And there’s more, much more. “You both blend history with lived experience.”

Specifically, he/she/it dug up an example.

“Hemkes loved to take a historical moment — 1572, early Dutch missions, the life of a pastor — and make it feel present.”

And me, the other end of this comparison you are delivering? “You do this constantly: prairie memory, Dutch-American heritage, small-town life, the way landscapes hold stories.. . .Hemkes would recognize your instinct immediately.”

 
And more. You both prefer clarity over cleverness,” the answer says. “Hemkes was not a stylist chasing fireworks. He wrote plainly, directly, with purpose.” And me? “Your sentences do the same. You trust the reader. You don’t decorate for decoration’s sake. This is a shared temperament. …This is the deepest kinship,” my Copilot says. “You both write to preserve."

Hemkes wrote to preserve “memory, doctrine, stories, the texture of Reformed life.” In comparison, you write “to preserve landscapes, people, moments, the feel of the Midwest, the stories that would otherwise slip away. "All of these, the screen before me says, are “the deepest kinship.”

Your prose shares Hemkes’ temperament, including “seriousness without heaviness, clarity without coldness, attention to ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances,. . .and a narrative grounded in landscape and lived experience.

“But your voice is more cinematic, ironic, expansive, American in its sweep, literary rather than pastoral. And then this: “Hemkes would recognize your instinct — but he would also see that you write with freedoms he did not allow himself.”

Freedoms? 

Yesterday, I came home from Wal-Mart with my very first box of Depends.

I could have told you I’m getting old, but I’ve learned enough about communication to know that I’m far more likely to set an idea in your conscious if I tell you about a box of Depends.

However I chose to tell you about aging, I’m trying to position you in a place where what I’m about to say makes sense and doesn’t just scare you. Here we go. I’m at a place in life when looking forward is neither easy, nor a particular blessing. No, I’m not wearing one of my new paper garments right now, and yes, I’m not lying about buying a bundle of them anyway; and I‘ll tell you why—because basically at my age, whatever aches and pains I have, whatever disorders confuse what agents of health within my system are fighting to keep fighting the good fight within me, it is far easier and more fruitful to think about the past than dream about the future. Dreams no longer amount to much.

I’m at work on two major projects right now, both involving gathered things I’d written years and years ago. In a week or so, a new little collection of old short stories will appear, and another will do much the same thing with stories about churches, stories I wrote and published decades ago on assignment.

I can’t help looking behind now—there is far more life behind me than before me.

That’s part of the reason learning what I have about this long-gone great-grandpa, a writer I never could have known, a liberal arts guy, was, for me, such an incredible and unexpected blessing.