I love this interview of Sherry Turkel by Bill Moyers. I read her book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
, and was struck again and again by her take on mediated existence and the need to post our experience. As she says, “sending is being” or “I share therefore I am.” She sees that young people (and the rest of us as well) can no longer tolerate the “boring bits” and that in all the texting and tweeting, lies a powerful seduction of being wanted. She tells us that we have lost our appreciation of solitude, and that we need to (re)learn – or in the case of younger people – learn how to gather ourselves and experience the richness of solitude. Like this:
Childhood’s Retreat
By Robert Duncan
It’s in the perilous boughs of the tree
out of blue sky the wind
sings loudest surrounding me.
And solitude, a wild solitude
’s reveald, fearfully, high I’d climb
into the shaking uncertainties,
part out of longing, part daring my self,
part to see that
widening of the world, part
to find my own, my secret
hiding sense and place, where from afar
all voices and scenes come back
—the barking of a dog, autumnal burnings,
far calls, close calls— the boy I was
calls out to me
here the man where I am “Look!
I’ve been where you
most fear to be.”
Robert Duncan, “Childhood’s Retreat” from Ground Work: Before the War. Copyright © 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1982, 1984 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
