I’m purging my closets and drawers. It’s a hard process as I seem to form an attachment to every plastic spoon, receipt, or sock that comes into my life.

Still, the hardest thing, for me, is throwing away newspaper clippings. I have boxes of old newspapers saved over the decades: front pages reporting either the most wonderful or most horrid events witnessed throughout my life. These newspaper pages are even more valuable, I think, as newspapers disappear.

Yes, I know, we can get it all online, and I do. Happily. But there’s something important about the soon-to-be-dead process of reading an article in a newspaper, grabbing scissors, and cutting it out to share or file.

One such article in my hand right now, poised either for the trash or for the “save” file, even poses an example of what we might call the “crisis of demise.” It’s about the key, and I clipped it in flight from the International Herald Tribune on March 3, 2013.

The headline reads “The Key to unlocking the doors of the Future.” Only the key of the future will no longer be a key. It will be an app.

The key’s days are over, the author Alice Rawsthorn laments. Digital technology is already changing how we lock and unlock everything from our cars to our houses. All too soon, actual keys will be gone, it seems clear.

So, she asks, what will happen to the very word “key” itself? What will a “key” be, conceptually, to future generations? Far more troubling, how will future generations understand phrases like “the key to the city” or a fresco in the Sistine Chapel wherein Christ gives the keys to the kingdom to St. Peter?

Here at Professor Carol we both celebrate and deplore technology, sometimes at the same moment. I, for one, don’t want to go back to my Underwood typewriter. But I wonder if I was a better writer when I had to give thought to each keystroke or risk starting a letter over (even after they invented white-out: some things simply had to be perfect). We teach our courses mostly online now, or on DVD. It’s wonderful technology that is transforming education and opening access to the learning at a lickety-split rate. Yet, will something important be lost when we no longer set our alarms, gulp breakfast, and go off to class, experiencing together whatever happens in that span of an hour?

I don’t think we know the answer yet. Rawthorne is not hopeful about the key. She writes that it’s unlikely the key will “sustain the centuries-old prestige . . . because any reflected glory associated with locking or unlocking is likelier to reflect on the digital device, not one of its countless functions.” I suspect she’s right.

One thing for certain: the task of teaching and preserving our Western Heritage won’t get any easier as the key elements (no pun intended) of our culture are phased out by digital applications. We will have to find smarter ways to teach the imagery of “the turn of a key” or “a key point.” And what will we do with this from Shakespeare’s Macbeth?

Here’s a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key.

(Act 2, c. 3) We may well “have old” (grow old) fighting the fight. But it’s a mission worth every fighting effort we can muster, so we’d best get on with it.

Meanwhile, I still don’t know whether I should toss or keep the clipping! What do you suggest?