I’m pretty sure this is where Dasein goes when he’s feeling down.
The latest Colorado shooter – like Jared Loughner of Tucson, Seung-Hui Cho of Virginia Tech, and the countless others whose names we forget after they have done their damage – could not legally have walked onto an airplane carrying a water bottle, or without taking off his shoes.But he could walk down the street with a legally purchased assault rifle, body armor, and as much ammo as he could lift.
Two men waiting, for another whom they know only by an implausible name which may not be his real name. A ravaged and blasted landscape. A world that was ampler and more open once, but is permeated with pointlessness now. Mysterious dispensers of beatings. A man of property and his servant, in flight. And the anxiety of the two who wait, their anxiety to be as inconspicuous as possible in a strange environment (“We’re not from these parts, Sir.”) where their mere presence is likely to cause remark.It is curious how readers and audiences do not think to observe the most obvious thing about the world of the play, that it resembles France occupied by the Germans, in which its author spent the war years. How much waiting must have gone on in that bleak world; how many times must Resistance operatives—displaced persons when everyone was displaced, anonymous ordinary people for whom every day renewed the dispersal of meaning—have kept appointments not knowing whom they were to meet, with men who did not show up and may have had good reasons for not showing up, or bad, or may even have been taken; how often must life itself not have turned on the skill with which overconspicuous strangers did nothing as inconspicuously as possible, awaiting a rendezvous, put off by perhaps unreliable messengers, and making do with quotidian ignorance in the principal working convention of the Resistance, which was to let no one know any more than he had to.
We can easily see why a Pozzo would be unnerving. His every gesture is Prussian. He may be a Gestapo official clumsily disguised.
Here is perhaps the playwright’s most remarkable feat. There existed, throughout a whole country for five years, a literal situation that corresponded point by point with the situation in this play, so far from special that millions of lives were saturated in its desperate reagents, and yet no spectator ever thinks of it. Instead the play is ascribed to one man’s gloomy view of life, which is like crediting him with having invented a good deal of modern history.
I went to bed at night looking forward to my nineses and then, as soon as I woke up, I stumbled out of bed, dressed and went to Delectica before I was even properly awake. Although I loved them and should have savoured them, I started gobbling my doughnut and drinking my coffee in a hurry, gobbling and slurping them down in such a frenzy that I barely tasted a thing. Before I knew it the high point of my day was over with. It was only 8.45am and there was nothing to look forward to. I also found it increasingly difficult to keep my rapture to myself.One morning, as I gobbled my doughnut and slurped my coffee, thinking to myself, “What a fantastic doughnut, what an amazing coffee,” I realised that I had not just thought this but was actually saying aloud, “What a fantastic doughnut! What a totally fantastic experience!”, and that this was attracting the attention of the other customers, one of whom turned to me and said, “You like the doughnuts, huh?”
“And the coffee!” I said. “The doughnut would be nothing without the coffee – and vice versa.”
“Where you from?” he said.
“England.”
“Don’t they have doughnuts like that in England?”
“Not like this, they don’t,” I said. “I’ve spent 20 years searching for just such a doughnut. Now that I’ve found it I can go to my grave a happy man. I’ve achieved everything I wanted from life.”
“Well, enjoy,” he said, as though I had been making a joke.
Robert Gifford, a psychologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who studies the behavioral barriers to combating climate change, calls these habits of mind “dragons of inaction.” We have trouble imagining a future drastically different from the present. We block out complex problems that lack simple solutions. We dislike delayed benefits and so are reluctant to sacrifice today for future gains. And we find it harder to confront problems that creep up on us than emergencies that hit quickly. “You almost couldn’t design a problem that is a worse fit with our underlying psychology,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.
The great allure of the superhero, of course, is that he has the tools necessary not only to fight the more elemental forms of evil, but also to pre-empt them: to sweep down, cape flying, whenever ordinary law enforcement fails to anticipate or reckon with a threat. Indeed, for all the famous grittiness and violence in the Batman movies, very few innocents perish on screen.In real life, matters are tragically different. Yes, sometimes vigilantism saves the day; sometimes people working on the outskirts of the law can protect those of us who live within it; sometimes the law itself can prevent evil men from gaining the tools to wreak destruction.
But often, the most important defense of civilization takes place only after tragedy has struck, and innocents have perished. And the real heroes are neither police nor politicians nor an imaginary batsuited billionaire, but the people — whether in Columbine or Lower Manhattan or now Aurora, Colo. — who carry one another through the valley of the shadow of death, and by their conduct ensure that the Jokers and James Holmeses of the world win only temporary victories.
Fifty years ago, in The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx drew widespread attention to the complex role of technology in the construction of the American pastoral image. In Marx’s reading of rural landscapes through works of literature, technologies like the locomotive appear as markers of the widespread encroachment of human society, with its simultaneously constraining and chaotic structures, into idealized spaces of gentle wilderness. Today, in 2012, I find myself identifying changing standards in computing as markers of the incessant expansion of human control systems. If the train whistle was the signal of human civilization entering the otherwise serene realm of the garden during the 19th century, what is the marker of technological incursion today if not the sensor, the ringtone, or the drone? In contrast to the violent intrusion of the train into nature, the creep of computing is much quieter, but no less jarring. Indeed, terms like “ubiquitous computing” and “pervasive computing” suggest that our latest technologies go anywhere; unlike the train, they don’t need tracks.
What’s most interesting is that he totally blew the call on where the battle-lines would be drawn. In Gibson’s universe, corporations are fighting each other for trade secrets, with highly skilled software assassins dancing elegant battles against elaborately constructed firewalls. In the real world, the defenders are hopelessly outgunned, fighting a battle standing on fragile software platforms while illiterate script-kiddies fire off salvo after salvo of brute-force attack. And rather than priceless technology blueprints, the booty that companies are trying to protect is the mundane: credit card numbers, music and movies.Also, in “Neuromancer,” the battle is largely invisible, with the average person on the street unaware of the carnage occurring electronically around them. By contrast, the general public is painfully aware of how vulnerable modern computer systems are to abuse, and pretty much anyone who uses the net regularly can tell you about DMCA takedowns and the perils of SOPA. In short, Gibson may have been right about the net becoming an online warzone, but he failed badly to identify the what and why of the war.
The day, of course, is ubiquitous as a unit of organization, regulated by our cycles of waking and sleep. But when we think about work, the dominant fact of our lives, we think about the week. Just consider the feelings the words arouse. Day: nothing much, except a little bit of hopefulness, maybe. Week: dread, languor, tedium, woe. Yes, we sometimes speak about making it through the day, if we’re having a bad one, but as Erma Bombeck knew, we always speak about making it through the week. Despite the etymology of the word, it is the week, and not the day, that has become the repository of the quotidian: of triviality, of drudgery, of routine. Days differ; weeks are always the same. Days begin with dawn; weeks begin with Monday. “Thousands of petty annoyances and grievances”: that’s the week all over.The Sabbath grew into the weekend as industrialization made labor increasingly arduous, persistent, and oppressive. No more seasonal rhythms, farm work subsiding in winter, no more profusion of saints days. If the week expresses something natural—in the sense, at least, of an instinctive response to circumstances—it is the weariness of the spirit under the regime of modern life.
It is difficult to believe today, as Chatwin’s contemporaries did, that he was simply an extraordinary man to whom extraordinary things happened. Perhaps critics couldn’t detect his inventions as easily, at the time of their publication, because in the last days of hippies on the overland trail, travels like Arkady’s in Asia, or Chatwin’s with nomads, were conventions of the time, which still seemed to have depth and vitality. Perhaps we didn’t want to detect them because myths about aesthetic tribes, or about erudite English Hemingways, were still so appealing. Perhaps we simply wanted to believe that the world was as replete with rich coincidences and meanings—as overdetermined—as Chatwin wanted it to be. Or perhaps the fault lies with the intervening years, in which his fantasies and style proved so addictive that a thousand imitations have marred the original.Today, however, Chatwin’s fictions seem more transparent. We may not be too surprised to discover the journeys with nomads for which he “quit his job,” and which John Lanchester admired, were brief interludes in a period more accurately described as Chatwin getting married and becoming an undergraduate at Edinburgh University. And the passages, suffused with symbolic and literary resonances, that once seemed most impressive, no longer seem the most satisfying. His personality, his learning, his myths, and even his prose, are less hypnotizing. And yet he remains a great writer, of deep and enduring importance.