Better to follow Churchill’s admonition, “I am all for your using machines, but do not let them use you,”123 because the only tools that will work for the close, careful, and informed analysis of a complex text (even the text of your life) are, in fact, invisible. They are in some ways much harder and in some ways much easier to use than something that comes in a box and is supposed to make the work attendant to literacy unnecessary. This is so, because the benefits come from the effort itself rather than from trying to outwit it. Which begs the question, why would we move in this direction with the enthusiasm of the newly converted and entranced?
The countries of the West and those of systematic Asia are variously subject to fallacies of equipment. Man has made his way up with tools, and the more advanced and mechanized his society the more faith he puts in them. In the seventies, I took up climbing. I was never much good, but I was a superb equipment handler. Had I not actually climbed, I would have been what we used to call “an equipment weenie.” Maybe I was an equipment weenie. More recently and more appropriately to my age, I’ve taken up fly fishing. Looking back at my climbing days, I recognized the danger and decided to avoid weeniedom as much as possible. You can see investment bankers and the like clanking down to the stream as heavily laden with equipment as if Orvis made Sammy Davis Jr.’s gold chains. Were they to slip on the mossy rocks over which their felt-soled British waders are supposed to take them without incident, they would sleep with the fishes after being pulled under by their thirty-thousand-dollars’-worth of clothing and tackle. They are often so heavily accoutered that they may not be able to tell that they’re outdoors (if they can actually get out the door). Although my Yeatsian dream of cutting a switch and using it and thread to best the guys from Goldman Sachs has proved impractical, I did buy the cheapest and most incomplete set of equipment that works, and it feels better that way. The equipment is responsible to me, not vice versa. I don’t have to give it a thought, and instead can concentrate on the elusive fish. Nor was it necessary to float a bond issue.
This is not surprising to me, in that I’ve always run fastest in my oldest shoes. At the Rivanna Rowing Club in Albemarle County is a man who has won first place in his age group at the Head of the Charles Regatta five or six times. The racing shell in which he triumphed was worn and unfancy. Surrounded by glistening gel-coated sharks with Ferrari-like rigging, his boat looked unimpressive. But with him in it, no one in his class could catch him. Perhaps he might have gained a few more seconds had he had a boat three times as expensive as the one he had, and perhaps not. More likely, the relaxed feel of his battered shell and the opportunity to focus not on it but on the race itself afforded him more than just a few extra seconds of speed. And in reading, writing, and understanding the world in its richness and truth, equipment is of far less moment than it is in a rowing race, though the conventional wisdom is evolving as if the opposite were true.
We move in this false direction because we accumulate materials and power for their own sake and as a result of impulse rather than thought. The new machines and new processes bring at least the illusion of exactly the kind of powers for which people hunger as if for opium. And yet the accumulation of things or power is one of the most efficient destroyers of happiness, running close on the heels of poverty, disease, and death. We look back with perhaps the greatest affection at those times in our lives when often we had the least, times of a certain austerity when the story was authentic and love and beauty apparent, clear, and accessible. Not the deprivation that weakens and kills, and not austerity imposed purely by circumstance or from above (although it is possible to make use of these in the same way) but the austerity of our own will, in which life can be made richer and its colors deepened by refusing that which dilutes and obscures it. Choosing to be always connected, to do a thousand things at once, to have “everything” available instantly, to skip at great speed from subject to subject and person to person, is to model oneself after a machine, to take on its attributes and, by necessity, to leave behind many of the qualities of being human. Electronic loneliness is truly insidious, because it seems like its opposite. The new “connectedness,” though it may appear to be a broad snowfield welcoming one ahead, is rather a paper-thin crust over a black crevasse.
Whereas the ability to gather and manipulate information has
