I thank whatever Gods that be that even at the age of 89 my mind remains restless and eager to absorb new facts, new theories, new ways of looking at life and the world, new stories of mankind’s continual search for perfected knowledge, new illuminations of the spirit. Not a day passes which is not full of surprises for the mind, insights which set me thinking in ways not thought before.
I was reading about the poet W.H. Auden, whose poetry I often love to read – but I had not seen this description of how he conceived of the making of poetry:
“A poet has one duty which is to try, and by one’s example, to protect the purity of the language. I’m a passionate formalist on hedonistic grounds……In order to write at any given moment I have two things on my mind. One is a certain subject I’m interested in and the other is a series of formal questions connected with language. It may be metre, it may be diction, what-have-you, and the subject looks the right form and the form looks the right subject. When these things come together, then you’re able to write. What one secretly hopes from readers is that they will say ‘My God, I knew that all the time but I never realized it before.’ That’s the ideal reaction and then you know that you have said something that is true. I think if you ask me what is the function of not only literature but of all the arts I would say what Dr. Johnson said, ‘The aim of writing is to enable readers a little better to enjoy life or a little better to endure it.’”
In recent times very little has distressed me more than the way financiers in the rich world have got away with ruining the lives of millions of ordinary people by their incompetent, recklessly greedy, sometimes clearly criminal practices – not only got away with it without a single indictment but with nearly all of them back to earning huge bonuses. I find, to my grim astonishment, that more than two centuries ago Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States, was warning of the dangers of reckless banking in the strongest terms. Here is what President Jefferson wrote in 1802:
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation , then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property, until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
I can understand what I am told by any number of the younger generation, including my sons and their friends, about the miracles of accessibility to information and advice and entertainment which the latest electronic technology makes available. Given such worlds of instant knowledge and stimulation at one’s fingertips, lives are bound to be filled with more interest than ever before and people certain to be better equipped to find fulfillment. But I am not so sure. Enough can be quite enough if enough is of sufficient quality. In an article on spending time all alone on a remote uninhabited islet off the coast of Chile called Farther Away, Jonathan Franzen captured, I think, an insight which makes sense to me. He pointed out that there is a big problem in projecting ourselves indiscriminately into the cyber world: “There’s no end,” he writes, “of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning. To be everything and more is the internet’s ambition.”
I am concerned that access to “everything and more”, will put at risk our full enjoyment of anything in particular and our ability, or even wish, to concentrate for any length of time on what otherwise might become one’s special, deeply considered and carefully wrought contribution or gift to the world. A ceaseless, restless hunt daily through cyber space is unlikely to lead to great careers or lasting achievements.
