June 15, 2007
-
Good Isolation, Bad Isolation
You know how in all the great adventure stories that include woods there’s always the one creature that lives in a tree? I somewhat want to be that creature. The main group of travelers always enters the woods on their quest, and eventually run into the old man or creature that lives in the tree. He is friendly and has an idyllic earthen house that he shelters them in. While they eat his pourage by the fire, he explains the dark mystery that has lived in the woods and tells them the next piece of the information they had needed to know. So I think I’ll go find a good thick wood, build a house into a mound or tree, stock it with a bunch of old books with riddles about the woods in them, and then wait for the adventurers to run into me on their desperate quest. Should be jolly.
If you think that the world is a place where all humans are set into motion on a course set for eternity, and yet are sinful, how could you not also think that redemption of their cursed bodies, the salvation of their decrepit souls, would not also be the greatest struggle?
It is unimaginable to us that we live away from civilisation, in solitude, as a monk would. And yet, our culture is increasingly designing itself into a place where isolation becomes all but too easy. Nowadays, in a world where we live in compact cities with booming populations, being around people has been pushed to the point of having to be a conscientious decision. Far removed from the community centered culture of our ancestors, computers, mp3 players, television, and cell phones make being around people something we must choose to do. We don’t need to. There’s blogging, jamming, watching TV, and texting instead of actually being with other people. Though we fear the frustrating thought of solitude, we fail to see we are already embracing it more and more everyday.
I like to read books that were written by people that could have never even conceived that I would ever be reading it. The old books, the ones from another time, another place, rather than ones written with a person like me reading it in mind.
Comments (3)
I like it when blogs are written in distinct sections. Makes it easy to see what exactly I want to comment on. But all four of these somewhat seperate segments, to me, coalesce and melt into a single theme, generating this one genuine reply from this distant stranger’s mind: wow, nice post.
even though we have communication with blogs, e-mails, websites, texting, and instant messaging; telephones and cell phones; televisions, dvds, and videophones; with more “connection” we grow farther apart: there is something innately singular about two living beings sharing their presence with one another, something mysterious, sacred, special, natural, right. with artificial communication (manmade is not a part of how life was intended to be, i think [maybe? some people say we were created to create and so manmade can be/is good. but if so there's a fine line.(sin). take the tower of babel, for instance.] (“but manmade never made our dreams collide”. the whole song “awakening” kind of pertains to this.)) or maybe a better phrase than “manmade communication” is “incomplete communication”)…with artificial communication there is something missing. maybe we have the “-ication” but not the “commun(e)-” part when we send ideas to one another through electronics and anything artificial. it is much easier to be distracted, for one thing, and simply lose the human connection; you don’t really have to worry/think about eye contact or being tactful (of course, tact can be a bad thing in some cases, like in a life-or-death situation, but in this case those cases aren’t applicable, i think) or really be too emotionally involved (and it gets worse as it digresses from video to audio and then to text),and other things like these. [notice i am communicating this to you through the medium of text...how convenient.] maybe it is possible to have the same sacred bond or even more without human presence–two people who live together and hate one another versus a mother and son who have been separated since the son’s birth but have always used telephone to talk to one another (but still, the thing is that with two people living together who hate each other, it’s still more real. i think when hate and violence are involved, the lines are blurred, though. anyway, maybe it’s just a natural fear of mine (of the unknown) to want to keep it the way it naturally is [notice how my natural fear wants to keep things natural] but some fears are good and healthy.]; it’s just much harder to have the natural bond with another person without physical presence (this is not a dualist philosophy, i suppose). and having human presence doesn’t guarantee sacred connection; it’s just how it was made to be and thus simpler and easier and perhaps more satisfying in the long run. and plus, there are no electronic hugs (yet…i hope there never are. i hope people don’t try to recreate every human experience–maybe only for the sake of our fallibility when we try to recreate part of nature. we will miss something. we know so little about the structure our own nature and the nature of the human experience; we shouldn’t try to create something like it, then. actually, we can–there is the sacred and mysterious act of creating life the way all humans have ever done–but we do not understand this. and do we need to? i do not oppose understanding; i love love love understanding. i just don’t know…people can be so dangerous with knowledge and all. this sounds taoist (“do not educate the people”). maybe it’s not right, because there is good in some technology, i think, like agricultural and medicinal technology. but what if we just experienced life like it has been lived for the rest of time. yeah, i guess there is some good in exploring and understanding and all. it’s just that from our vantage point, looking back over history, especially the past century, technology can be so death-giving–nuclear bombs, guns, biological weapons, gas chambers. but i guess if you want to have power over people, you’ll figure out a way. there were slaves and oppression and wars and such long before electricity. there were swords and things.
) that was a long parenthetical caption.
but what if we had no technology? for one thing, we wouldn’t damage the planet too much. or others.
but disease would kill us easily.
it’s much easier in small communities than in a world of billions of people.
maybe this is why we need to be saved.
so anyway, human presence is good (“God saw all that he had made and it was good.”); human-made “presence” is not as good.
Jesus wouldn’t have have a blog. that’s something i wonder about. Jesus did use the cultural context he was in…ie he did carpentry/stonemasonry/something like that so he used technology (maybe it wasn’t meant to be that way in the beginning, or maybe it was, but in our situation maybe it’s different?). and paul and all the bible writers used the medium of writing, which is not as natural as speaking. maybe the danger isn’t in writing or other impersonal communication, but in forgetting (in your mind and thus in practice) that others exist as more than an idea.
maybe it’s not right to boycott (essenes-ish or pharisees-ish) or to just go with the technologically advancing flow (herodians-ish); it is better to go the Way of Jesus, somewhere in between ignorance/apathy and isolation/sulking-away-muttering. there are benefits to being able to, say, talk to people in other states that you would not get to otherwise. but still it seems that the nature of things, the way they originally are, is the best way. i think. it’s complex, though. there are tons of people you wouldn’t meet without a blog. tons of people who would die without new medicines. tons of people who explore their passions through electronic music and other media. maybe some of that is good.
maybe it’s all good.
maybe it’s bad when we start thinking of others only as ideas. (i’ve often felt that i just think of God as an idea.) instead of someone infinitely like us in being a human being full of worth, and infinitely unique and having worth therein. the image of God.
then there are the side effects of pollution and cancer and such.
for humans, it’s trial and error. and when we do good it’s easy to get overconfident. and a lot of the time, when we do bad is when people change and start to live the right Way of the One. that’s a twist.
this thing goes deep. there’s so many dimensions to it.