The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

by Michael Harris

  Perhaps, despite the dullness, despite the cotton-stuffed torture that goes along with 31 days of disconnection (the very opposite of epiphany, of gaining access to some new understanding), I have learned something after all. That I am so irrevocably, damnably, utterly wired to the promise of connection that I have to constantly, every hour of every day, choose which connections matter in a given moment. I’m not going to fast away the distracted parts of my brain with a month-long Internet sabbatical; if I’m going to live intelligently in the world, I’ll have to do it every hour of my life. How exhausting, I thought to myself, as these conditions dawned on me in the shower this morning. How very exhausting. Yet how very worth it.

  • • • • •

  There’s this idea that keeps getting whispered through history. It was Thoreau who first suggested it to me, the idea that we aren’t lonely because we are alone; we are lonely because we have failed in our solitude. Thoreau was never seeking out loneliness, after all. He went to the woods because of his loneliness; he went into the woods to enjoy the company of his bare self. Here was a twenty-eight-year-old Harvard-educated man who walked out of town with a borrowed ax and, using native lumber and scrap wood, built himself a twelve-by-fifteen-foot cabin to live in; his nearest neighbor was a mile away. He dug a root cellar in the soil. He planted a bean field. He had no job, but he read and wrote and watched the woods around him. He gave himself two full years there to “follow the bent of my genius.” As surely as the Internet burrows pathways into our neural network, Thoreau wore a pathway from his hut to Walden Pond. He seemed to prefigure our understanding of neuroplasticity when he wrote: “The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels.”

  But which paths did Thoreau think we should follow? What exactly was Thoreau’s idea of good solitude? I returned to my own copy of Walden. Rereading that distillation of quiet wisdom again, I was struck by one well-trotted line:

  I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

  But it’s the sentence that follows that adage, a less famous line, that I want to unpack here. Thoreau goes on to say, “I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear.” I did not wish to live what was not life. There are two ambitious assumptions being made here. The first assumption is that the bulk of the buying and selling and managing that makes up the everyman’s daily existence can be set to one side and counted as “not life.”21 The second assumption Thoreau makes is that once we discern what is “real life” and what is not, we can then cut away the fat. His book is the knife he offers.

  Walden is nothing so clear-cut and encouraging as the self-help guidebooks we now hoist to the best-seller branches of Amazon charts. It means, rather, to outline a mental crisis and then leave each reader to step into that frame of reference should he or she choose. I wonder if, one day, Walden will be carried around on the tablets of the young as a kind of security blanket to ward off the crush of connectivity they were born into. Perhaps it will deliver the same intense meaning for those youths as The Sorrows of Young Werther once did for eighteenth-century German youths. A totem for a new Romanticism. Perhaps, instead of taking Grand Tours of Europe, future youths will embark on a tour of Solitude. A Grand Absence. Might they roam through the backcountry of their own lives? (Probably not.)

  I’ve asked myself many times, in the course of my research for this book: What Would Thoreau Do? Would he, rather than shut himself in a cramped hut for a couple of years, refuse to pick up a phone for as long a stretch? Would he murder his social media avatars? Our twenty-first-century Thoreau would have difficulty discerning the limits of his experiment: Is banking permissible, since it’s so utterly reliant upon electronic transactions? Where would he draw the line? Arguments could be made against any aspect of life, since none is untouched by the Internet’s influence.

  Thoreau was a latter-day Spartan, but also a deeply prudent man, which makes it difficult to know how far he’d take things today. Still, we know that even Thoreau—even in the midst of his two years at Walden Pond—was no absolutist. He had his clothes mended by folk in the nearby village. He purchased bits of pork and handfuls of salt, to complement the beans and turnips he grew for himself. Rice, which he could not grow, was a major staple of his diet. I don’t think the goal was ever to cut himself off from society—far from it. The goal was to steer himself into crowds only when and how he saw fit. To not be drowned by “what was not life.” To limit the number of moments that brought him into the society of other men and women and thus to make them more meaningful. Later in his book, we see again that his motives are a lust for life, not a fear of it: “I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.”

  Just as Thoreau never pretended that cutting out society entirely was an option—and never, as a humane person, wanted to be entirely removed—we shouldn’t pretend that deleting the Internet, undoing the online universe, is an option for us. Why would we, after all, want to delete, undo, something that came from us? It bears repeating: Technology is neither good nor evil. The most we can say about it is this: It has come. Casting judgments on the technologies themselves is like casting judgment on a bowl of tapioca pudding. We can only judge, only really profit from judging, the decisions we each make in our interactions with those technologies. How shall we live now? How will you?

  More than 150 years ago, Thoreau worried about you and the future you inhabit. As he sat in his cabin, he could hear whistles and rumbles along the Fitchburg Railroad, which ran nearby. “The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods . . . informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town.” Thoreau mentions that doing things “railroad fashion” (meaning quickly, efficiently) has become a byword and he writes about the implacable sureness of the new iron technology as it barrels forward, blasting its whistle. “And it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track. There is no stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this case. We have constructed a fate . . . that never turns aside.”

  • • • • •

  The steam-powered locomotive (which arrived at the front end of the nineteenth century) may have been a sign of that dangerous fate for Thoreau, but only a few generations later, train travel had already become a symbol of an idyllic, slower past. We see that in Glenn Gould’s radio documentary “The Idea of North” (part of his Solitude Trilogy). The work takes place (if anywhere) on a train trundling along 1,015 miles of track between Winnipeg and Fort Churchill in Canada’s barren north. Why do people go north into so much nothing? Gould wanted to know. So he took the train himself and struck up a conversation in the dining car with a surveyor named Wally, who became a sort of narrator for the piece. Along with Wally’s voice, we get a small chorus of others, men and women drawn to the supposed wasteland miles and miles above Canada’s “habitable” region, whose voices rise and fall like instruments in a chamber group, now overlapping, now speaking solo, to create an impressionistic meaning out of multiple associated viewpoints. Gould found that the folk heading north were motivated not really by the supposed desire to escape humanity, but rather by the impulse to embrace the very human parts of our lives that can be grasped only from within a certain solitude. In one television interview, Gould said that the people on that northbound train had something to find out about themselves: “They wanted to make inquiries about themselves.”

  Gould had a theory that for every hour a person spends in the company of others, the sane person ought to spend a certain (larger) number of hours on his or her own (he didn’t know exactly how many hours that’d be, but he figured it was “a substantial ratio”). He valued comm
unication but wanted it in particular doses, and he certainly wanted it on his own terms. Despite this quasi-hermit attitude, his few friends were harassed regularly by charming, infuriatingly long, excited phone calls. His fans were often disappointed by concert cancellations—until he stopped giving concerts entirely in 1964. He had decided to devote his practice entirely to electronic media and focused his career on recordings (in his way, Gould was reflecting the ideas in McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, which had been published just two years earlier).

  The train to Fort Churchill is still making its slog for those who choose to disappear into the tundra. About twenty-three thousand passengers—heading into what absence?—take that train each year.

  I’m on another train at present, writing these lines in a car of The Canadian at a pace that Thoreau would have called racing, I call pleasantly rolling, and my children will consider glacial. We’re making our way through the Rocky Mountains, far from the tendrils of Internet signal. My fellow travelers and I resign ourselves to conversation with one another, but when we pass through a town, one will leap up in his sweatpants and hold his cell phone aloft: “Got a signal!” And then the carful will dig out their own phones and rapidly download e-mails or call up mapping apps to pin themselves on a digital landscape. The moment is short-lived, though. In a minute or two we’ve slipped, once more, into the obscuring wilderness, flanked by the hush of Canadian pine forests.

  • • • • •

  Can we ever recall our former selves in a lasting way? Can we truly remember absence? Aren’t some things gone forever?

  We know that the spread of writing, in Harold Innis’s words, “checked the growth of myth and made the Greeks skeptical of their gods.” We know that “the immortal inconclusiveness of Plato was no longer possible” once the technology of writing wiped away a certain mystery. Some sensibilities may require a particular technological environment. And just as oral culture could then be understood only through the lens of writing, the scribal culture that followed would one day be viewed, says Elizabeth Eisenstein, “through a veil of print.” Earlier viewpoints become clouded to future generations. How can we ever see the world as they did when we look through such different lenses? We have no real comprehension of the oral traditions that the written word wiped out or the scribal tradition that the printing press deleted. We cannot entirely know what we lost. So how will our children know what is disappearing now? Another veil is being drawn; it may come to pass that pre-Internet culture will be viewed only through a baffling screen beaded with 1s and 0s.

  • • • • •

  The value of absence is always an intangible thing, whether that absence is a memory or a current reality. Yet, in quiet ways, we get our hints.

  Anthony Storr, writing about poetic inspiration, notes that “by far the greater number of new ideas occur during a state of reverie, intermediate between waking and sleeping.” My favorite creative personalities always seem to have just returned from some isolating tower or other. I wonder, for example, if the shocking “jazz” elements that cropped up in Beethoven’s later years were in fact thanks to his deafness. Did his auditory absence free him from preconceived notions? We need such absences in order to think and see for ourselves. Indeed, the kinds of thoughts that present themselves in our emptiest moments—the moments when we stare out the train’s windows or hover on a lawn to monitor the sky—are the only thoughts that can deliver a strange new understanding. Such understandings, such experiences, cannot be programmed or puzzled out, but must be felt in the bracing air of absence. We have decades of studies showing that our psychological state, too, responds well to a little solitude. Rural settings enhance mental faculties and check the aggressive, neurotic tendencies we foster when we never get out on our own. The spaces in our lives that technologies filled in were never such barren places after all. Those spaces were where we stored our magic, our hope, and the longing that drove our striving souls.

  Seneca tells us that “men’s greatest achievements are the products of their seclusion.” Yet most of us, most of the time, are living not in seclusion, but in a state of “restless idleness,” flitting from one stimulating conversation or curiosity to the next, then and now. Flitting may be too kind. Elsewhere, Seneca refers to “the restless energy of a hunted mind.” Ultimately, he argues for balance and for decisive choices:

  It is, however, necessary to combine the two things, solitude and the crowd, and to have recourse to them alternately: the former will make us long for people, the latter for ourselves, and the one will be a cure for the other: our distaste for the crowd will be cured by solitude, our boredom with solitude by the crowd.

  Seneca, like Thoreau and like Gould, is far from a misanthrope. He desires that our connections be more valued, more imbued with meaning, more purposeful. And that we not be terrified of a little time with our fascinating selves.

  Some are already working toward the preservation of absence. There’s the Sloth Club in Japan, which promotes the “slow life movement” and runs the often candlelit Café Slow in Tokyo. Or the Long Now Foundation in the United States, which designed (and is currently building inside a mountain in western Texas) a clock that will run for ten thousand years, defying our obsession with speedy gains. There are still monasteries, nunneries, and Buddhist retreats. Software engineers are delivering programs like Freedom, Anti-Social, and Pomodoro, all designed to shield you from a maelstrom of computer-derived distraction. And there are authors like Susan Cain, writing books such as Quiet in order to meditate on “the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking.”

  But these, of course, are the exceptions. And the desire to hold on to absence, to throw cold water on the spiraling apprehension of the busy mind, may be a fleeting one in the course of human events. The historian of ideas Noga Arikha positions herself the same way I position myself, as one “lucky enough to come from somewhere else, from a time when information was not digitized.” She feels it’s that outsider status—our status as the last of the daydreamers—that gives us the chance to use the Internet and all digital media with a measure of wisdom. It’s a fantastic position, truly, to be in—we digital immigrants will be extinct in half a century and, with us, the balancing act that Arikha wrote of:

  I waver . . . at times gratefully dependent on this marvel, at times horrified at what this dependence signifies . . . the reduction of three-dimensionality to that flat screen. . . . Where has slowness gone, and tranquility, solitude, quiet? The world I took for granted as a child, and which my childhood books beautifully represented, jerks with the brand-new world of artificial glare . . . faster, louder, unrelated to nature.

  I think Arikha, like all people alive in this moment, is engaged in an act of massive translation. We are the few translators of Before and After. It’s a privileged thing to be a translator, but not an easy thing. Marshall McLuhan foretold our discomfort:

  Those who experience the first onset of a new technology, whether it be alphabet or radio, respond most emphatically because the new sense ratios set up at once by the technological dilation of eye or ear, present men with a surprising new world. . . . But the real revolution is in this later and prolonged phase of “adjustment” of all personal and social life to the new model of perception set up by the new technology.

  How long will our phase of adjustment last? Another twenty years, another fifty? Will readers of these words, even ten years from now, have kept in mind the adjustment that came before? Will they recognize that adjustments in our attitudes reflect more fundamental changes? And what pains, discomforts, and revolutions of yours, dear future reader, will be forgotten by those who follow? What curious and new things will become inevitable and natural to others? What bright and eager lives will you call delusionary?

  • • • • •

  Absence isn’t going to return to us easily. Just as we decide to limit our intake of the sugars and fats that we’re designed to hoard, we now must decide to sometimes keep at bay the connectiv
ity we’re hardwired to adore. We must remain as critical of technological progress as we are desirous of it. And we must make these decisions not because we dislike the things we could connect to, but precisely because they’re so crucial to our survival.

  Every technology will alienate you from some part of your life. That is its job. Your job is to notice. First notice the difference. And then, every time, choose.

  EPILOGUE

  What Comes Across, What Stays Behind

  “THE end of absence” is a disobliging subject—precisely because it looks, to the casual eye, like a lovely collection of gains. What’s more, once an absence is ended, we can hardly remember what use it had to begin with. Indeed, why complain at all? Bemoaning the end of an absence is, it seems, the duty of Luddites and cranks. Which is to say, we brush off those who eulogize such losses.

  Besides, maybe the real eulogy was delivered a long time ago. We all like to think we’re living on the brink of the future, that this is the pivot point, but wasn’t our pace of life largely settled in the nineteenth century? In the shuttering of the Arts and Crafts movement and the final silencing of the bleeding Romantic poets, we find the last stand of some pre-modern sensibility. The boldest of these stands was made by those famous resisters—the Luddites (they suffered the firmest stamping out, too).

  I’ve been called a “Luddite” a few times while working on this book. It always surprised me, because my approach is hardly a call to arms. Part of me is very ready to let the Giant Robot in the Sky take care of me. The breezy availability of new cloud technologies is as comforting and omnipresent as a god in the heavens. It’s only a small and stubborn part of me that resists and worries about the end of daydreaming and all that.