February 25, 2007
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Driving is like another world. If driving is another world, then the regular world is just walking around in my human body. While walking around in this body, I am an agent and I interact with the other human agents, and that is the entire paradigm for the initial world.
However, driving presents itself as an entirely different reality. The basis of agents has changed. Cars are now the main agents with which I interact, although now it is not me interacting, but my car.
This idea of a mode of interaction existing on a personal earth that is utterly impersonal and unrelated to the life the creatures are living fascinates me. Life is this amazing experience in which we receive a body, and while in it we feel extraordinary emotions and see wonderful sights. No matter which human it is, at its last breath, the human body has just encountered something quite incredible.
But then there is driving. Driving is where the personal, incredible creature climbs into a metal machine that transports them elsewhere. The person leaves the nondriving state and enters the driving state. In the driving state, life is left behind. Once out of the car again, the person enters back into the human-based interaction world. Thus, driving is like a place that is inbetween life and its normal variables. It’s the one place where you are interacting with humans, that you actually aren’t interacting with humans.
While cruising I’ll see faces in other cars blurrily whirring past me. All these lives I don’t know passing by just meters away, and yet I don’t know them. These are the same people I see in the paper, or hear on the radio, or that voted in elections, or were part of a statistic, or were sitting by me in the movie theater. Since America is often referred to a whole, I often think about how that doesn’t make any sense because no person is America, nor is America gathered anywhere concomittantly. But if there is one place where America is always most present, it is on the roads.
And this is what fascinates me: in the midst of all these personal ideas, such as all the elements I mentioned above that I encounter in my time in this world, such as reading the paper, or voting, or all those ideas, is a realm where it all disappears. It’s just driving. You cannot talk to the other people, only honk. As a personal being, a human, I take on an impersonal body, a car, and stay in that impersonal state until I reach my destination.
All the people I am always thinking about, distant people that have likewise been thrust into this odd existence, silently make their appearance on the roads. My home is where my individual existence is emphasized, the roads is where the world’s existence is emphasized. Wonder overtakes my mind in thinking about the people traveling to many different places and living many different lives. Sometimes I’ll see a car make a turn and imagine following it with my imagination and being that person going somewhere else, thinking other things, living another life. It’s extremely weird to think that someone is not me and also doesn’t even know I exist. I have loud thoughts, experience overwhelming emotions, have many complex and intricate relationships, and exist in this body in an unbroken continuation of time, and they don’t even know about it?!
Driving to me is all about experiencing wonder. Sitting at a traffic light I will start looking around and thinking: “Maybe I’d like that person.” “How is that guy’s life going?” “Where’s she going in such a hurry?”
But I’ll never know. Driving is just driving and there’s nothing more to it. This strange dichotomy exists between the life I know, and what things are like while I’m driving.
Driving actually makes me think about different worldviews. Because of the neurological basis for our existence, some people think humans are just machines, and that is all. That would make humans pretty comparable to cars: A car has an engine, a human has a brain. If the engine dies, the car dies. If the brain dies, the human dies. But I think the driver is a great analogy for the soul. Sure the car is a machine and sure humans are biological creations, but beyond that is a very personal idea steering it all. A human body does have programmed functions, but cars as just engines don’t work. Cars are not just following predetermined routes like trollies on tracks, but humans actually control them. Similarly, humans are not just numbers in an equation, but are directed by a force much more personal than an engine.
Cars are more than engines, they have drivers. Humans are more than brains, they have souls. If we had no souls, I would expect a very different world. I would expect a world like driving. Living life without a soul is like driving in traffic. Just cars on roads, nothing inside them, just following the law and driving and driving and driving.
By the way, that’s not an argument. Just a way of looking at things. You either have a soul, or are an equation. Not to speak for you, but I feel a taint of irony when I ask myself, “Am I an equation?”
Happy Driving.
Comments (8)
I couldn’t remember if I had already responded to your comment and didn’t want to waste your time with the same response twice. So calm down, sir.
My comment will not be related to your post. Not to say that it was a bad post, I rather enjoyed it. But I’m watching the Oscars and therefore am rather distracted. Oh and I’m still a little miffed about your immediate dislike for a show you’ve never seen.
My dislikes? Well I’ll have to get back to you on that. I’m a fairly agreeable person.
The above person dislikes people who dislike shows they’ve never seen. Or so it would seem to the casual observer.
Regarding the post, I sometimes wonder if there isn’t some sense of cosmic irony to the universe.
Good stuff. You put words to thoughts I’ve had but never expressed.
I’ve thought and felt the very same things…except the part about the soul. Your musings there are like a car thinking its not a machine because it doesn’t just follow a track like a train does.
Humans don’t want to be just monkeys, monkeys don’t want to be just lesser mammals, lesser mammals don’t want to be just reptiles, reptiles don’t want to be just fish, fish don’t want to be just single-cellular organisms, those don’t want to be just proto-cells, proto-cells don’t want to be just chemicals…chemicals don’t want to be just atoms and so on and so forth. And no one ever manages to simply enjoy the level of complexity as biological machines that they are at.
Where’s the soul of the video game bots that have highly complex behavioral patterns and don’t follow a prescribed track? Where will their soul be when they get more and more complicated? What’s going to happen when you simply can’t tell the difference between a computer program and a person? What are you going to do when it asks you how *you* know you have a soul?
ARU
Hey! I’m glad you enjoy the comments. I enjoy leaving them and reading what you have to say =]
I really like what you said about George McDonald. It’s soo very true. I think that humanity is so wrapped up in themselves and making A change they aren’t really thinking about changing themselves because they are just out for the glory.
Also, I never really noticed that until you mentioned it. So much for being observant! Haha. I actually wrote a philosophy paper about things being connected and that normally one is provoked by another and another. I guess in a way, there is no one real starting point.
Well, have a lovely evening!
Simone =]
Agnostics R us…. monkeys and proto-whatevers do not question wants, they just are. We humans are the only highly differentiated brain creatures, the only upright bipedalist with strange dreams in their heads and a queer tenderness for this place of that. It is only we who question life and atthe same time fail to.
I enjoyed reading your ruminations and active dialouge with your lived and living experiences. Such is telling of a depth of soul that is capable of great suffering as well as great love.
Man has become a gear in the engine of the vehicle of progress he created. We can build only on the foundations already laid. We have become extensions of the ideas and enterprises that dicate our day to day living. The car is a new community, fully intact with the voice of mans hopes, dreams, fears and loves. It is our voting booth, our feet and our message to one another. It has become a standard of measurement and a symbol of status, our freedom and our cage. Dare we rage against reality as it is dicated to us?
Yes, Bonehoeffer… I have read and own, The Cost of Discipleship, and A Testament to Freedom… which includes his Letters from Prison. Peter Kreeft… Making Sense Out of Suffering is all I have from him. If you are into Catholic thought I recommend reading http://www.firstthings.com it is great for an extremely biased Catholic view of the world.
guess who’s back!.. i had to start reading your xanga stuff again. i’ll try to comment regularly. sorry we couldn’t play chess tonight. if you’re english skills are of any equivalence to your chess skills.. i think it’s clear you will have the upper hand within our strategic battle for dominance.