A/N: Here's just a little serial of thoughts I have. Little commentaries. I'll continue it in this thread.
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The universe is routine. We have shrunk eternity, popularized galaxies, named stars. We have given a symbol to infinity, and defined infinities in terms of size, shape. It is what we are best at – making things closer than they appear, much smaller than they really are. We do it with names, categories, statistics. Afraid of dwarfism, we send great, all-seeing telescopes into the irises of galaxies to take pictures that are sold to National Geographic, slapped on magazine covers, eyed for a moment by the casual spectator. An expanding supernova, crystalline in its gaseous state, twisted in divine pain like Prometheus to his vultured rock – galactic pornography. On seeing such a photograph, we are initially beset with the most minute stirrings of awe and mortality and smallness, impressed with God.
For a moment.
Then we start looking for evidence of airbrushing, digital enhancement.
Then we turn to the table of contents.
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The most pressing concern for my generation is not Pleistocene survival, keeping up the farm, dodging a draft, or combating boredom. It is finding something original to say, finding the right avenue to say it, and then obtaining as many responses as possible. We are entranced by the inflation of a ripple, the stationary medium of the networked wave. We are a generation of Likes, thumbs up. A generation of forums, anonymity, tabbed pages, downloads. Even as I say this, I am self-conscious. This has been said before. I am not original. In fact, I am aware that the most pressing concern for my generation is steadily evolving, changing, becoming more sophisticated. I am inherently wrong. We are the particle flicked through the double slit – the moment we are observed, we act differently.
There is no way of knowing our position, our momentum.
We cannot be defined.
We cannot be stereotyped.
We are, after all, the product of everything that has come before. We are the cobbled carcass of our parent's music, our grandparent's cars, our great-grandparent's philosophers.
Unfortunately, the word cliché is French.
And pessimism is in, as you can see.
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Roland Barthes, whoever that is, has been quoted as saying, “Literature is the question minus the answer.” However, in looking at the world today, I'd say more often than not we are inundated with answers without questions. Information we did not ask for, did not need. The leading cause of lung cancer in non-smokers is secondhand information – a thin, trembling smoke that stains the ceilings yellow and never quite washes out of the hotel curtains. Our consciousness is fragmented by information. We drag our rubber soles across the carpet of the internet, sound bites, the hard drives, and spark thoughts from our fingers as a static electricity through anything that will hold a charge, a one, a zero.
My dad described to me the other day the process of 1970s high school research. To begin with, there was no computer, no cerebellum of circuits, oracle perched, inhaling the Delphic gases of wikis and online encyclopedias, bland-faced. You had to go down to the library. You had to go into the reference section. Dewey decimals. Drawers of index cards that you would flip through like recipes. Hard-bound reference books with heavy pages, edged with finger-tip blood. Microfiche.
He was a little confused himself as to how he ever managed.
