I've come to talk with you again.
If only I were listening.
And why would I want to? It's March Madness season, which means I have no less than three apps open right now, each one tracking my seven different brackets, along with the requisite play-by-play score updates, analysis, Giant-Killer tracker, Bracket-Buster warner, Insider predictor, and the constant flow of the Twitter feed push alerting its way onto my screen.
I also have text conversations simultaneously going with 4 different groups of people -- all told numbering 31 individual friends/acquaintances -- discussing the tracking of my seven different brackets, along with the requisite play-by-play score updates, analysis, Giant-Killer tracker, Bracket-Buster warner, Insider predictor, and the constant flow of the Twitter feed push alerting its way onto my screen.
Meanwhile, I am playing 14 games of Words with Friends with 14 people, some friends, some acquaintances, some perfect strangers (2 of whom must be a robot, because their vocabularies are insanely, frustratingly perfect). My Facebook page is dinging, because I posted my infant son holding a copy of my brackets. Because he is so adorable, I have 10s and 20s of people Liking this photo because he is adorable with another 10s and 20s of people ignoring the kid and commenting on the actual brackets themselves. To which I am compelled to reply.
The television is on. Basketball on no less than 4 channels. Non-stop analysis on another two. Commercials playing on all 6 at once (I know this because I flip between all 6 to make sure, while trying to watch Gone in 60 Seconds, because I can't not watch that movie when it's on). I have music playing in the background. At least I think I do. I remember turning the music on. But I may have lost track of the background. It is buried deep at the moment.
My phone is vibrating. And dinging. I wait. It is now playing music, my ringtone, Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" which means that if there is still music playing in the background, it is now competing with the speakers on my iPhone. As well as the music from the commercial playing on my television. And the different-sounding dinging alerting me of my robo-opponent playing more impossible Words. Also, the chirping of some weather report I forgot that I set. Rain coming.
I think I hear my infant son crying. Is he still upstairs? Huh.
In his 1946 essay "On Silence" Aldous Huxley identifies that monumental technological achievement, the radio, as the new and pervasive medium for noise, calling it "nothing but a conduit through which prefabricated din can flow into our homes."
I wonder how much harsher Mr. Huxley would assess the newest tech wonder, the smartphone, against the radio. How much more devastated he would claim our personal worlds to be because of it. How much noisier our personal headspaces are because of it.
I wonder. And I can only do so by turning it off. All of it.
The vision that still remains in Simon & Garfunkel's song exists -- wait for it, gentle reader -- within the sound of silence.
And I think the silence exists not by looking down, to my screen, but rather up, to my world.
I think.
