I live on a little dirt road in the piney woods of the far end of Cape Cod. Even in the summer season the Outer Cape is a relaxing getaway, but in the off-season it feels downright remote. If you get out on the forest trails in the unsettled parts of the protected National Seashore, the chaotic, networked world really does feel a million miles away.
I’m mentioning this because it’s getting harder and harder for me to understand how a person can live in both at once. More and more, the world of shared, public experience is a dizzying kaleidoscope of images, narratives, rumors and impressions, and what’s striking about it above all is the extent to which everything is completely dematerialized: our news media, our social interactions, the things we read and listen to, and even our money all exist as weightless, intangible impulses that dart from place to place, everywhere on Earth, wholly unaffected by physical distance, in no time at all. Distinguishing truth from fiction is now nearly impossible, especially as more and more of what is thrust before our faces for instant judgment is wholly outside our competence, however pressing it may be (this last is due in no small part to the accelerating pace of innovation in fields most of us know nothing about, but which have increasing effect on the turbulent flow of events).
But if I take a walk outside here in Wellfleet on a clear winter day, that other world is nowhere to be seen. The sun, the sky, the water, the woods, the soft carpet of pine-needles underfoot, the clean sea air — all of these are real, and local, and tangible, all around me. They change, but only at the comprehensible pace, and in the familiar ways, of persistent, physical things. I perceive them not by squinting at a small, glowing screen, but with the coherent, integrated array of all my senses (and my 66 years of experience). That other world — that swirling, immaterial kaleidoscope — is nowhere to be seen; it seems untouchably distant, like a strange, half-remembered dream. How can it possibly compete with the solid and stable and consistent reality right outside my door? Yet more and more, it is that dematerialized, hallucinatory mirror-world that enslaves our attention: a gravitational force that pulls us harder and faster as we approach the singularity.
How long do we have before we cross the event-horizon? There will be no return.
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I walk every morning in the forest around my house in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s physical and real. Smell fresh. Sometimes slippery. Sun comes up. Weather blows in. Most everything elsewhere is plastic and fake. Urban people even look like zombies. It’s gonna blow.
I am selfishly glad you have resumed more frequent blogging. I’ve been too distracted or busy to comment earlier, but these recent posts of yours have repeatedly absorbed many of my few stolen moments for ponderous reflection. These sorts of thoughts frequently occupy my current frame of mind, and you express it very adroitly.
I haven’t ever been to Cape Cod, though my teen years were spent in Mass. I am on the left coast (15 minutes removed) and in a small progressive town. But I deeply relate to the awareness of the dichotomy b/w that ‘remote’ world; remote because strictly local, and detached from the technologically networked cosmopolis.
Seems to be our job to explore and experience that event horizon, in one way or another.
Thanks for provoking and making me feel connected.
My wife and I have lived here in a CCRC retirement community for a little over 4 years. The church group that started this facility also runs two more in NC and Va. Ours is located on the outskirts of a traditional small town. We are in our mid 70s and are in the lower half of the resident age demographic. Neither this small town nor this community are wrapped up in the large metro world of plastic reality, although an hour drive will put me in Raleigh or Charlotte if I wanted to torture myself. I don’t.
We frequently lose friends and neighbors of course and they are replaced by more seniors and the cycle starts again. This month, so far, we have lost four members, one a close friend of my wife’s. All of us do what we can for each other and off campus for the town residents. That is often food drives, meal prep and serving to some miserably poor.
Living here reminds us: do what we can, pass on what we know, help if asked offer if not. In all things, while alive…live.
I guess you’re not a racist, sexist, homophobe, hater, etc. Otherwise, you’d be able to discern quite easily who’s on your side and who isn’t.