At a narrative writing workshop, a journalism professor holds up a paper copy of the local newspaper. "Who reads this in this form every day?" she asks. The sixteen students – all of whom want to make their careers in the field – exchange guilty glances, sheepishly don't raise their hands. The reason? The paper newspaper only updates us once a day. "It's easier to read the news online," someone says. "I can stay current better."
My boyfriend scrunches his brow, watching the first of the Harry Potter movies, which is playing on TV on a Sunday evening. His disbelief isn't suspended. On the screen, a computer-animated troll interacts with one of the movie's young British protagonists. The special effects aren't all that great, we say to each other. We see much better stuff now, a long seven years since that film's release. I try to imagine what seven more years' advances will look like, and give up almost immediately.
The state where I live is nearing its 150th birthday. We drive long distances to see the places where Western history happened here: a fort, a lighthouse, a faint set of wheel tracks etched into the dusty earth. We are impressed by things a century old. Meanwhile, somewhere in Austria, a gilded sign over the door of a certain café announces that beer and meat and bread have been served within those walls since sometime in the mid-900s. Yes, I typed that correctly: before the turn of the last millennium.
Tonight I'm reading from a book on school bands published in 1938. I find it impossibly endearing every time the two authors make a pointed and breathless reference to "The World War." How strange these two men would find me, with my laptop and cellphone and more worries about carbon footprints than marriage.
It seems easy to say that we're living with a particularly strange notion of time right now, but I wonder if that hasn't always been true. Thoreau wrote of time in 1854: "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains."
Are we merely impatient, we modern 21st century humans? Has technology done away with our ability to wait and see? Religions of the world offer the idea of eternity as the ultimate comfort: a prize to be gained in the afterlife, where all is perfection. Patience is a virtue. We all say we want more time, a long life, more hours in the day. And what would we do if we had it?
Is eternity going to be a long series of text messages 2 shrt 2 use propr englsh? omg!
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4 comments:
Thank you for the beautiful mediation on time. I'm always amazed at how your writing manages to humanize otherwise inhumanly large issues.
Dang, Chris, I'm gonna put that on my resume!
Thank you.
We do seem to be speeding up. Back just a couple hundred years ago, the world was about the same when you were born as when you died. Now, kids who are in high school are growing up with a totally different technological environment than we had - and it's only the difference of 10 years. If this was just the difference of a few extra gizmos, I'd say that it's not terribly important; but these technologies have ushered in a paradigm shift. We are now in a hyperspeed society, where ever bit of information is instantaneous. I truly think the only thing that's going to slow this thing down will be the cognitive limits of our species: once we reach a point were we simply cannot process all the stimulation, then it will level off. But that's probably still years off. Just thinking out loud.
One thing I've noticed is how our immediate generational predecessors seem to have had a very advantageous place in chronology. In the recording arts there is a lot of info. A lot. And you are supposed to be responsible for all of it. I look at the older generation that teaches us in absolute awe. Then I realize that they were learning on monaural tape recorders back when computers were strictly military. All you needed to be versed in a subject was to keep up to date with new trends and developments. They were the founders of the approach with which future technologies were applied. We, it seems, were dropped into the deep end of the pool, with a "Here ya go, swim!" We don't have the luxury of learning at the pace of the flow of time, rather we are all required to be pioneers and historians at the same time. I don't doubt this conundrum permeates many disciplines. At least that's my observation. I could be making complacent excuses for my lack of knowledge in certain subjects, but I'll never tell.
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