Good, now and then, to be reminded of how dependent we are on wires and wireless. Go back five minutes, and there I am, pressing a button on a machine I don't understand, to find that, for a reason I don't (yet) understand, the internet can't be found. Go back another distance, and there I was, with my typewriter, and my ink pen with the scratchy nib, and my crusted bottle of Tippex. Do you remember the day I mended the broken n key with a paperclip? Go back a longer distance, and there we are, sealing our letters with sealing wax while the monks in the valley letter, by hand, the books that we will collect for our library. The clocks tick, and need winding. Go back further, and we know, without doubt, that angels and demons and the spirits of the unquiet departed roam a flat earth.
Go back even further, and we know on which side of the tree the lichen grows; we know which berries and mushrooms to eat; and all of us here in this temporary shelter have known, from early childhood, how to make a fire from what we find on the ground and in the bushes around us. We know how to be part of just about any acre of wild ground, how to live from it, draw warmth from it, find or build shelter on it. We are not proud of knowing how to navigate, track each other, hunt, eat, find safety, live; we just take it for granted. And I hope that the knowledge we have always had lives on in some vestigial bone-memory of how it was, let's suppose it does, so that an archaeological site, or the stones at Carnac, or the faces of bystanders in a mural in a Florentine church - they trigger a faint recognition, even touch a deep memory. We were there, weren't we?
Do you feel that? Look the other way, and can you feel our descendants, in a distant future, moving through the museum, looking at the illuminated manuscripts, the stone tools, the sextant, the triptych, the portraits of the Medicis, the bronze-age weapons, the icons ... and the the funny old laptops, tablets and smartphones? Everything we've left? I wonder which reproductions and souvenirs they'll choose in the giftshop.
The internet? Oh yes. Problem solved. There are evenings, in this house, on which children cannot be relied upon to go to sleep unless the wireless connection is switched off. No skill required, not even the memory of how to tell a soothing bedtime story.
Go back even further, and we know on which side of the tree the lichen grows; we know which berries and mushrooms to eat; and all of us here in this temporary shelter have known, from early childhood, how to make a fire from what we find on the ground and in the bushes around us. We know how to be part of just about any acre of wild ground, how to live from it, draw warmth from it, find or build shelter on it. We are not proud of knowing how to navigate, track each other, hunt, eat, find safety, live; we just take it for granted. And I hope that the knowledge we have always had lives on in some vestigial bone-memory of how it was, let's suppose it does, so that an archaeological site, or the stones at Carnac, or the faces of bystanders in a mural in a Florentine church - they trigger a faint recognition, even touch a deep memory. We were there, weren't we?
Do you feel that? Look the other way, and can you feel our descendants, in a distant future, moving through the museum, looking at the illuminated manuscripts, the stone tools, the sextant, the triptych, the portraits of the Medicis, the bronze-age weapons, the icons ... and the the funny old laptops, tablets and smartphones? Everything we've left? I wonder which reproductions and souvenirs they'll choose in the giftshop.
The internet? Oh yes. Problem solved. There are evenings, in this house, on which children cannot be relied upon to go to sleep unless the wireless connection is switched off. No skill required, not even the memory of how to tell a soothing bedtime story.