Phones and the Wider Picture.

There were two teenage girls walking up my lane at twilight yesterday. They kept stopping and walking on, and stopping again and walking on again. They seemed rapt in deep and close conversation, and I was intrigued. When they finally arrived at a spot close to my gate, I saw what they were doing. One was poking and stroking a smart phone and the other was taking a lively interest in whatever was on the screen.

At that point I felt the urge to engage them in conversation. I wanted to say to them: ‘If you’re going to take a walk on a country lane, surely you should be observing the landscape around you. You should be noticing the way in which the natural world operates. You should be considering the relationship between nature and the human species. Further, you should be asking whether this view of reality in which you are presently functioning – or think you are – is all there is, and even whether it is real at all. You should be striving to make sense of it in the context of consciousness, and asking whether consciousness is rooted in material existence, or independent of it and capable of functioning separately. You should even be asking whether existence itself is an objective concept or part of some illusion incomprehensible to the limited faculty of human mind. For heaven’s sake, girls, you can poke and stroke a smart phone sitting on the lavatory. Isn’t it (like golf) a waste of a good walk?’

I didn’t say anything of the sort; in fact, I didn’t say anything at all. I don’t suppose I need to explain why.

*  *  *

But here’s something a little more interesting: Four years, two months and ten days ago, somebody sent me a photograph as an attachment to an email. Tonight I looked at it for the first time. Part of me thought it was verging on the hideous, while another part thought it rather lovely. It’s another example of my favourite maxim: perception is the whole of the life experience. And I shouldn’t divulge the subject of said photograph since I don’t know the identity of the person who occasionally drops onto the blog from somewhere in the UK. I might become incriminated.

All I’ll add is that today was not a good day (very few are these days.) That evocative phrase ‘went down in wan and weariness’ was perfectly apposite to the twilight again, and ‘wet’ might be added to complete the alliterative trio. Now it reminds me of Poe’s ‘and Darkness, and Decay, and the Red Death…’