A Walker in the Suburbs

Just as we gravitate to candidates or causes because we already know and like what they have to offer us, so too do we choose books because we expect them to reflect a world view — or a hunch — we already have.

And so it is with The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. I remember reading a review of this book when it came out a few months ago and wanting to buy it immediately. But I forgot the title and the author. This is a telling fact. Because the subtitle of the book is What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

I was hoping to find in this book an explanation for why it seems more difficult for me to concentrate, why I interrupt my reading or writing constantly throughout the day to check e-mail or Google a word. And I’m finding that and so much more.

“Our use of the Internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it.” Carr cites brain studies and other research to support his claims. He provides an intellectual history of the reading brain. And he reaches this conclusion: “The mind of the experienced book reader is a calm mind, not a buzzing one.”

So it may be that I chose this book because I knew it would support a theory about the world I already have. But even so, this once-calm but now-buzzing brain thinks Carr is onto something.

Last night I watched the film “Young at Heart.” It’s about a chorus of senior citizens who find in communal singing a joyous antidote to growing old. The singers started out crooning vaudeville tunes, but their director keeps pushing them artistically until they can belt out rock and punk and Motown – everything from “Schizophrenia” to “I Feel Good.”

As the movie progresses its tone becomes more serious; mortality bears down hard. Two of the singers die a week before a big concert. They leave a huge hole in the chorus. But the others decide to go on. Their absent friends would want it that way. The last scene is the group on stage, singing their hearts out. Because of the music, they are “forever young.”

Watching this movie brought to mind a hymn, one that Pete Seeger made famous:

My life flows on in endless song:
Above earth’s lamentation,
I catch the sweet, tho’ far-off hymn
That hails a new creation.
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul–
How can I keep from singing?

You know you are removed from a war when literature is what it brings to mind. But such is the case with World War I, which ended 92 years ago today.

I think first of All Quiet on the Western Front, a book I read so long ago but which saddens me still: “He fell in October, 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.”

And I think of the poets, their modern disillusionment stuffed to overflowing into the restrained stanzas of formal rhymed verse:

“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”

This poem is by Wilfred Owen. He died in France — a week before the Armistice was signed.

Listen hard and you can almost hear it. The silence. The great pause. A momentary intake of breath before the hard exhale. It is shoulder season. Summer is over and the holidays have not begun. The fields are empty; the nights are long. November is peaceful, muted. It asks nothing of us now.

For some reason I have ended up on an email list for people planning my high school reunion next summer. This is funny to me because I was not one of the popular people then. But somehow now I’ve slipped through the ropes and gotten into the club. It’s enough to make me believe in democracy after all.

Last night I went to an obligatory driver’s ed meeting at Celia’s high school. As we stood in line to enter the auditorium, memories came rushing back. I thought about the cliques, the snubs, the constant measuring of one’s self against an ideal that probably does not and never will exist. Maybe democracy is a myth. Maybe I haven’t gotten over high school after all.

The rain began earlier than we thought it would, and I wasn’t ready. I had an umbrella, it wasn’t that. I’m just not prepared for the cold pelting, for the gloom. But who ever is, I ask myself?

The optimistic word for this weather is “cozy.” It is for making soup and cleaning the basement. But that’s only if you’re inside. If you have to trudge out into the world, as I do, this weather is for wearing big comfy sweaters and curling up at your desk with a mug of hot tea.

But whether inside or out, it is a time for turning inward.

Yesterday was All Saints Day; today is All Souls Day. Of the two, I’ve always been partial to the latter. For one thing, it never required a visit to church, not being a “holy day of obligation.” (There’s a phrase and a practice that’s on the way out!) For another, I figure that I know more souls than saints. Today is democratic: we pray for all those who have died.

But, expanding the meaning a bit, today can be a day of contemplation for the souls of all of us, the living, too, for the part of us that ripples beneath conscious thought, for our essence. “The soul is often hungrier than the body, and no shops can sell it food,” said the abolitionist and clergyman Henry Ward Beecher. Today, for me, will be about feeding the soul.

A word about today’s gathering on the National Mall, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.” It’s clever and it’s funny and lots of people I know are going, but I don’t want my daughter to be one of them.

She’s young enough that I’d like her first experience of such an event to be an actual and not an ironic one. It would take much more than a single blog post to describe how I feel about kids and irony. In short, I think it’s an attitude toward life best developed slowly and with experience. Best to at least start off life with some sense of purpose. There will be plenty of time later to become jaded.

I was heartened to read an op-ed in the Washington Post last week on this topic. In “A Like-In for Generation I,” Alexandra Petri, a self- described member of the Millenial generation, says, “To Generation I [that’s “I for irony, iPhones and the Internet,” she writes], for whom life exists so we can put as many things as possible in quotes, this ‘rally’ is the closest we will ever get to a love-in. It’s a ‘like-in.'”

At the risk of sounding earnest and old-fashioned and absolutely square — give me a love-in every time.

I have a theory about inanimate objects; I believe that sometimes they fix themselves. This belief has been roundly ridiculed by my family. But I write about it today because it has happened once again. My trusty Kodak Easy Share camera broke over the weekend, took odd wavy pink-tinted photos (see above). And today, now that I’m no longer in scenic Holmes County with a buggy in every parking lot, it is once again snapping fully tinted photos.

This — or something like it — has happened with radios, CD players, iPods, toasters and more than one computer. It has happened enough that I’ve begun to think these objects have minds of their own. They are like balky wayward children who when left alone will finally come to their senses. They want to be good. But as the parenting books say, they need to develop their own autonomy.

Just as the nonbeliever can always find a scientific explanation for miracles, so too can the skeptic poke holes in my theory. I realize that beneath this personification are loose circuits, faulty wires, software glitches. But I hold fast to my theory. I wait a day before calling for repairs. I believe that there is much about this world that we do not understand.

The birth of a first child is also the birth of a family. So today, as we celebrate Suzanne’s birthday with her, I think about all the places our family has taken us. Not just the states and the countries we have traveled to but the kind of people we have become because of each other.

Suzanne loves to run, and yesterday we stood on a crisp, windy course and watched as she and her teammates raced across the green grass, through the yellowing trees, and up an agonizingly long hill.

The wonderful thing about cross-country is that even the spectators participate. To see the race properly you must trot from one vantage point to another. So at the end of the race the runners aren’t the only ones who are exhilarated. Everyone is.

It’s kind of like a family.