Digital Barbarism Mark Helprin (grave mercy .txt) 📖

In August you will hear music seventeen times. Five times it will have been produced by actual musicians, twelve times by a needle tracing the grooves in a cylinder and echoing songs in extremely melancholy imperfection through a flowerlike horn. You will attend the theater once, in Italian, but you will spend hours reading Henry V and The Tempest (which you read each summer), and several plays by George Bernard Shaw. In your mind’s eye you will see the richest scenes and excitements known to man, and your dreams will echo what you’ve read, in colors like those of gemstones, but diamond-clear, and with accompaniment in sound as if from a symphony orchestra.

Your shoes are entirely of leather, your clothes cotton, silk, linen, and wool. You and your wife hired a rowboat and went to a distant out-cropping of granite and pine. No one could be seen, so you stripped down to the cotton and swam in the cold fresh water. Her frock clung to her in a way that awoke in you extremely strong sexual desire (for someone your age), and though you made no mention of it on the bright rock ledge above the lake, later that night your memory of her rising from sparkling water into sparkling sunlight made you lively in a way that was much appreciated.

Indeed, your memory has been trained with lifelong diligence. You know tens of thousands of words in your own language, in Latin, Greek, French, and German. You are haunted by declensions, conjugations, rules, exceptions, and passages that linger many years after the fact. Calculations, too, built your character in that you were forced to work elaborate equations in painstaking and edifying sequences. As in other things, in mathematics you were made to study not only concept but craft. And, yes, in your letter to the prime minister, you repeated—with honorable alteration—a remark you made some time ago regarding Descartes. At first you could not remember it, but then you did, because you had to.

Necessity you find to be your greatest ally, an anchor of stability, a pier off of which, sometimes, you may dive. Discipline and memory are strengths that in their exercise open up worlds. The lack of certain things when you want them makes your desire keener, and you are better rewarded when eventually you get them.

You cannot imagine a life without deprivations, and without the compensatory power of the imagination, moving like a linnet with apparent industry and certain grace, to strengthen the spirit in the face of want. Your son went out to India, and you have neither seen him nor heard his voice for two years. Thus, you have learned once more the perfection of letters, and when you see him again, worlds will have turned, and for the best. It was like that when you were courting your wife. Sometimes you did not see her for weeks or months. It sharpened your desire and deepened your love.

You have learned to enjoy the attribute of patience itself, for it slows time, embraces tranquility, and lets you savor a world in which you are clearly aware that your passage is but a brief candle.

I am of course deeply predisposed in favor of the second example, and in my view the vast difference between the two is attributable not to some inexplicable superiority of morals, custom, or culture, but rather to facts and physics, two things that, in judging our happiness, we tend to ignore in favor of an evaporative tangle of abstractions.

Unlike machines, we are confined to an exceedingly narrow range of operations. Though we may marvel at the apparent physical diversity of the human race, it is, given its billions of representatives, astonishingly homogenous. Of these billions, only a handful rise above seven feet. Not a one is or has been over ten feet. And the exceedingly low standard deviation in form is immense compared to that which applies to function. There is no escape from the fact that after a set exposure to radiation; absent a given number of minutes of oxygen; at, above, or below certain temperatures; or subject to a specific G-force, shear, or shock, we will expire. No one will ever run the mile in two minutes, crawl through a Cheerio,™ or memorize the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Because of our physical constraints we require a harmony of the elements that relate to us and of which we are often unaware. The Parthenon is a pleasing building, and Mozart’s Fifth Piano Concerto a pleasing work, because each makes use of proportions, relations, and variations that go beyond subjective preference, education, and culture into the realm of universal appeal conditioned by universal human requirements and constraints.

A life lived with these understood, even if vaguely, will have the grace that a life lived unaware of them will lack. When expanding one’s powers, as we are in the midst of now doing by many orders of magnitude in the mastery and flow of information, we must always be aware of our natural limitations, mortal requirements, and human preferences. For example, unlike his modern counterpart, the Englishman at Lake Como is graciously limited in time and space. Because the prime minister is in London or at Biarritz, the prime minister cannot sit down with him and discuss. In fact, during his fictional stay, only one of his colleagues visited, and spent several hours on the terrace with him in the bright but cool sunshine. All others were kept away by time and distance.

The man of 2028, on the other hand, is no longer separated from anyone. Any of his acquaintances may step into his study at will—possibly twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty a day. If not constantly interrupted, he is at least continually subject to interruption, and thus the threshold of what is urgent drops commensurately. No matter how urgent or pressing a matter, the prime minister cannot sit down with the tranquil politician.