Reflections on paperlessness, in the spirit of Ogden Nash

A mantelpiece doth furnish a room,
but of late mine has been looking decidedly bare,
For lack of invitations there. 
Proper ones I mean, stiff and shiny, with gilt edges and copperplate font,
The sort we all want
To impress the Armstrong-Baxters when they call, or the Finkelstein-Ferrers,
And make them wildly jealous.

Well, I have to admit there’s a lot
to be jealous about,
For such a card evokes visions of splendour both inside and out,
Oak panels and Aubusson carpets, marble terraces and sweeping lawns, black tie and beautiful women, silver salvers and carriages at eleven,
And a good deal else I’d choose for my section of heaven.

Alas, though, the last two summonses
did not come by the usual post,
But popped up on my screen as virtual
as the Holy Ghost,
One paperless wedding and one soirée, floating from their envelopes in misty landscapes of roses and bounding deer,
To hover limply here. 
No proper RSVP, just the options of
“Will Come” or “Will Not”,
In tones both rude and curt,
And nothing grand or beautiful to put
up on my shelf
To generally enhance myself.

Now take card concert tickets, or I wish that someone would,
And not insist that they were waved
in their faces from a screen, which
is no good
When they are hidden deep in emails
that resist my feverish scrolling
and scrolling and scrolling
And the third bell’s tolling.    
Besides, such tickets also had
mantlepiece cachet, 
Tasteful, though tidy, in an
understated way, 
Proving that I would just as soon go to
a Pinter play or a jazzmen’s gala
as a symphony by Mahler.
How evocative they were of the brouhaha of theatre, the smoky dive or the hushed hall, and the pause
before the baton falls, or the applause! 
Alas, alack for my old paper friends,
drowned in the flux to which all
history tends!

Talking of which, the ancient
Romans knew how to put on
a family-friendly show, 
And if you cared to go
To see Christians turned into salami
by ravening lions, or a gladiator minced in a net,
Your ticket was a free clay token, nicely stamped up with your row and seat.
As for the ancient Greeks, they could offer you an evening of Aeschylus or Euripides or some other learned, bearded head
For one solid coin of lead.
Those tickets, like ours, ended up in the gutter or the jakes, or otherwise tossed away,
But you’ll pay a dollar to admire
such things today.

Tickets for the stagecoach were fine, handwritten things, 
Allowing you to proceed from New York
to Elizabeth, New Jersey with maximum inconvenience and
a minimum of springs, 
Clinging to the roof in a blanket, since only wimps or the chronically sensitive travelled inside, 
And whiskey was not supplied.
But tickets in their true pomp came with the age of steam, 
When countless slow-scribbling clerks in shirtsleeves with eyeshades and cigar stubs parked behind their ears gave way to one swift machine,  
And whatever you needed, whether train or ship or show
Was pressed out as promptly as the ancients did it, aeons and aeons ago.

A train ticket was a companion, one you could needlessly but pleasurably pat
As it sat in your pocket, or stick in the band of your hat
Where any inspector could read it and,
if a considerate chap,
Would not disrupt your nap.
But now, when you must prove that you have paid to travel from Great Neck
via Des Moines to Yellowstone, 
the proof is in your phone,
Which when you are rudely woken
may turn out to have died
In the course of the ride. 
So where once a ticket gave you firm reassurance that the trip you had planned and packed and considered taking out a second mortgage for would actually occur,
Now all seems queasier.

I blame boarding passes for the
modern manner
Of conducting all life’s meaningful
events by phone and scanner,
For they were the first to convince us
that “Have QR code, will fly”
Was not pie in the sky,
And that moreover we would save the planet, and stop destroying trees, 
With habits such as these. 
Personally I’d rather learn the number of my seat, and whether aisle or window, and the gate, from a piece of reliable white card I am given
Than from some algorithm.

However, this is the age we live in,
and we must accept the proposition
That reality has inverted from its
previous position:
Digital now being substantial,
and card and paper
Just so much mist and vapour.

Ann Wroe, Obituaries editor, The Economist