Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [32]
Tonight, to the flicker of a kerosene lamp, I made inexplicable, rapid progress. When I got to the twenty-fifth chapter, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” I found Adams falling prostrate before the dynamo at the Great Exposition held in Paris in 1900, a huge electric generator with a giant cranking arm. To him the slowly undulating device symbolized a new and unprecedented Force that supplanted once and for all the animate energies of nature. A narrow and inhuman power at last had vanquished Fecundity, or Reproduction, which Adams personified in the Virgin and portrayed as the source of natural bounty. But even as he wrote wistfully about her passing, he bowed before what had replaced her.
Adams’s poignant shift in allegiances haunted me, and I couldn’t get enough of his writing. Why was the book suddenly so clear and full of insight to me? The subject matter was largely autobiographical, and not directly related to my field of interest.
In the modern university, with its rapid turnover of assignments and fast-paced technology, the human brain is treated as just another processing device and is expected to keep pace with electronic blips. But Adams’s thought, ponderous and discursive as it was, could not be summarily ingested. He had lived within a culture whose movements were still largely limited by the speed of horses; the ambling cadences of his writing preserved this pace. Having taught medieval history at Harvard besides, his verbal nuances hearkened back to an earlier epoch still and seemed to echo from the deep wells of time, the vaults of the great cathedrals.
This was the secret: to grasp his meaning, you had to be living it. Not merely your thoughts, but your various daily duties, the material accoutrements by which you performed them, had to fold together in a quiet rhythm, an interconnected unity.
And this explained not only why time moved more slowly but also why we had more of it, why we were able to relax and read the way we were doing right now: in the absence of fast-paced gizmos, ringing phones, alarm clocks, television, radios, and cars, we could simply take our time. In being slower, time is more capacious. The event is only in the moment. By speeding through life with technology, you reduce what any given moment can hold. By slowing down, you expand it.
Shortcuts lead to emergency mending sessions in order to piece back in what was cut out, to lengthen what was shortened: Computer users, cramped in a cubicle all day long, jogging around the block. Bureaucrats and financiers, zooming ahead along their career paths, then reversing gears to attend school concerts, ball games, and parent meetings. Captives of the technological environment fleeing for brief weekends to mountains, beaches, and rustic cabins.
What began as short lines become circles—myriad overlapping loops that, described on paper, resemble nothing so much as the cloverleafs of our freeway systems. These roundabout routes to satisfaction leave their followers less time than ever. For the better part of the day they are in transit, simply speeding forward, never arriving. In a world in which everything is in motion, motion finally comes to seem the absolute, the unfailing standard by which everything else is gauged. Progress becomes its own self-justifying logical loop, the endless cycle like that of the dynamo before which Adams bowed. Only from somewhere outside the loop, only from a position of true stasis, could it even be noticed. Only in the deep repose of a summer’s evening, serenely planted in a twilit cottage, savoring rich ideas, could I regain my bearings.
As I whiled away my time with the grandson of a president, Mary sat beside me, arm in arm with the Spanish mystic Mary of Agreda.
I was still deep in my book when, in the corner of my eye, a spark flashed. There, at the other end of the room near the ceiling, another spark flashed, and another.
“It’s a firefly,” Mary observed. We peered over at the little flicker bobbing up and