I’ve started checking e-mail in classrooms and in co=ee shops.
I’ve read news articles at stoplights, at my sons’ swimming lessons, at restaurants, and yes, once or twice in the bathroom
while I peed.
Tap, tap, tap. Scroll, scroll, scroll. Paul Krugman, baseball
scores, tide tables, www.edge.org, Immanuel Kant, blender-eats-camcorder, the tour schedule has
changed, click here to watch a venomous snail paralyze a gold>sh.
Information, information, information—it’s all sustenance for that rawboned, insatiable, up-to-the-second
twin of mine. I can stand in a river
with my little sons beside me pitching pebbles into a deep, brilliant
green pool with a ?ight of geese ?
apping along overhead and the autumn
sun transforming the cottonwoods
into an absolute frenzy of color—
each leaf a shining, blessed fountain
of light—and Z will start whispering
in my ear about oil prices, presidential politics, the NFL.
What, Z wants to know, are we
missing right now?
Addiction, neurologists say,
changes the physical shape of our
brains. Each time old Z >nds
another text message, another headline, another update, my brain
injects a little dopamine into a
reward pathway.
“You’ve got mail!” squeals the
computer and—whoosh!—here comes
a shot of dopamine.
I feel stronger, says Z.
Five minutes pass, the dopamine fades.
I’m weak, hisses Z. I’m hungry. I need to see a picture of
Joe Biden.
What if, while you read the last few paragraphs, something in the
world has changed? What if, during the past >ve minutes, someone, somewhere, sent you a text? Shouldn’t you go and check?
Being addicted to the wired universe might be perfectly
healthy, of course, and it’s certainly defensible beneath the triumvirate of technology, curiosity, and progress. I’m the >rst to
admit that there’s something enchanting and invigorating about
my computer. There’s magic in reading a note from a friend in
Rome and clicking through Halloween pictures from New
Jersey and verifying John Steinbeck’s birth date in two clicks.
The Internet is indeed its own strange, blessed fountain of light.
But sometimes I think Z’s demand to feel connected is tilting
us both toward derangement, especially when we rise together at
three a.m. and stare for a half hour into the black vacuum of the
backyard and drink a glass of milk in
the doorway of the kitchen before
walking over to the computer and
waking it up and >nding out that
while we sweated and twisted in the
bedsheets, BeachReady Body had
been preparing a totally unique and
groundbreaking Body Transformation Formula for us, as well as for
Leslie in New Mexico and Ben in
Des Moines.
“We fall in love, we drink hard, we
run to and fro upon the earth like
frightened sheep,” wrote Robert
Louis Stevenson. “And now you are
to ask yourself if, when all is done,
you would not have been better to sit
by the >re at home, and be happy
thinking.”
Do we like sitting by the >re?
We do.
Does it make us happy to think? It
does. For a while. But pretty soon
don’t we start worrying, now that
we’ve stepped away from the world,
that the world is slipping past without
us? Don’t we wonder, when we come
back, Am I still here?
Oh, the strange mix of revulsion
and pleasure Z and I felt when we
returned from >ve days under the sky in the middle of Idaho and
watched the e-mail counter piling up: 21, 32, 58, 74 e-mails! Z has
74 e-mails! Z is indeed part of it all! Z was missed! Z exists!
We’re not the >rst to wonder about all this, Z and I, not the
>rst to sense that maybe our shared life is rushing by too
quickly, too feverishly. We’re not the >rst to feel as if we are
scrambling to make our voices heard against an in>nite and
obliterating silence.
During the >ve days Z and I spent in the mountains, we saw
lots of Shoshone pictographs, paintings made in caves mostly,
and under overhangs: >nger-painted elk and owls and dogs and
triangle-bodied hunters with bows. Many of the pictographs in
