In the wonderful play, Marat/Sade,
the old marquis remarks about Paris in the French Revolution: “All around me,
people were turning themselves into strangers.” Well, this is not Paris, and
God knows it’s not the eighteenth century, but it’s happening again, to me.
It used to be that I could go to the gym and, despite not
being gregarious, I could at least chat with people or nod to them or say
hello. Now everybody is in his own world, connected to an electronic device
which absorbs all his or her attention, to the exclusion of everyone else. That
last phrase, to the exclusion of everyone else, is what I’m talking about. I go
to breakfast at the local bakery and glance about, and what do I see? People
connected to their devices, smartphones or laptops, uncommunicative, unaware
it seems that anyone else is there. It doesn’t matter who or how old they are, something
which I cannot even imagine is being sluiced into their ears, directly into their
consciousness, while they remain unconscious of the world around them.
In the pre-connected days, married couples would sit reading
their newspapers, not talking of course (marriage does that to you), but occasionally
glancing up over page tops and half-glasses to say, “Did you see what Dick
Tracy’s doing?” Or, “How ‘bout them Dodgers?” To which the other would at
least grunt in recognition if not in reply. Now I watch people in restaurants
sitting two feet apart, each plugged into an alternative
reality, not only not speaking, but not even looking at one another. Couples
young and old, children, whole families, each one of them preferring a private
piped-in world to the company of others and the world around them. Not
connected; disconnected.
It’s happening in my own family. Of the two children still
living in my house after what seems three lifetimes of parenting, neither one
is accessible anymore. My step-daughter spends, quite literally, her entire day
gawking at her smartphone, and my teenage son seems to have purple earbuds
surgically attached to his skull, plugged into some kind of sinister device
which he guards as if it were the Grail, or at least, his gummies.
How many times have I asked them, begged them,
threatened them, to “Put down that damn phone!”? At least a dozen every day,
which is why, I suppose, they ignore me, in much the same way that a
callous ignores a tight loafer. I find that I must repeat the beginning of
every sentence I say to my son, since it is lost in the second or two it takes
him to a) realize that I’ve spoken to him, and b) extract the earpiece from his
head to say, “What?” Just today, as I was driving him home from school, I
began to inquire what he had for homework and, shaking the bud from his ear, he
asked me to repeat it. I lost all composure, and in what I felt was absolutely
righteous indignation I said, “Stop watching those damn podcasts!” To which he
replied with equal indignation, “You don’t watch
podcasts, father.”
Touché. Proved once again to be so totally un-hip, so
utterly out-of-touch that I was reduced to sullen silence. Of course you don’t
watch podcasts; I knew that, right? You listen to them. But what had I done?
Handed a teenager a loaded pistol of cluelessness which he could use the next
time I tried to interrupt his electronic self-exile.
But the last straw came last night. After a long day of meetings,
driving back and forth to school, back and forth to a music lesson, a
conference call instead of dinner, and finishing a paper I owed for
the online graduate course I really have no time for and probably shouldn’t be
taking, I finally stumbled into the bedroom, where my darling wife was watching
the Korean news on her laptop, collapsed on the bed, and gasped to her that I
was absolutely exhausted. At which she yanked a white earbud from her
precious little shell-like and said, “What?” That was it. The ultimate
abandonment. The light of my life had become one of those yellow bulbs that are meant
to keep pests away.
Nobody talks to anybody anymore. Nobody even looks at anyone
these days. Take me, for example. I have lived a long life, traveled the
world, have decades of education, read thousands of books, possess a near-encyclopedic
knowledge of classical music, Russian Literature, World War I aviation, the
history of mountaineering; I can carry on a conversation on just about any
topic that doesn’t involve pop culture, but I cannot compete with the Internet.
The other day my son asked me a question about the Amish. I answered in some
detail, explaining their origins, doctrines, customs, talked about their
language, giving a few examples, and explained where they lived and how they
got there and why. “Gee, Dad,” he said, “how do you know so much?” To which the
answer is: I read, a lot; and I remember what I read.
But books are going out of fashion. They can’t compete with
the Internet either. I have about 5000 books in my house, with shelf-space for
half of them and a garage so packed with boxes of books that I don’t even
fantasize about parking my car in there. I have more books in my home than they
have at the local library (I know; I’ve been there). My house looks
like a Christian Science Reading Room with cats. But neither I nor my books can
compete, it seems, with a five-inch screen and a pair of purple earbuds.
And so I had to make a rule: no cellphones at the table, either
at home or when we go out to eat. If we’re going to sit across from each other,
engaging in the oldest ritual known to Man, the family meal, we’re damn-well
going to look at each other and talk to each other. So tonight, at dinner,
the rule went into effect. I put Brahms on the stereo, turned down the lights, lit
the candles, and laid out the good plates and silverware. We all sat down to
one of my wife’s excellent Korean dinners, and I kicked off the conversation by
asking them about their day. With what result? Well, to paraphrase
Poe: And the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token, and the only
word there spoken was the whispered word… “What?”
At least we were looking at one another.
