The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection (14 page)

A single lashing from the sun—the most authentic body we know—could shake our fantastic Machine. The promise prompts us to imagine a moment when our Machine stops entirely (as Forster did). The thought experiment is as enlightening as it is gruesome.

Think of that moment when the fridge shuts off, causing you to realize—in the silence that ensues—that you’d been hearing its persistent hum before. You thought you knew silence, but you were really surrounded by the machine’s steady buzz. Now multiply that sensation by the world. Think how cold, how naked, how alone, how awake, you might be. Your own private Carrington Event.

Amazing, how through the creeping years absence could leave us so quietly, so stealthily—yet the return of absence might be so violent a shock.

When from our better selves
we have too long

Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,

Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,

How gracious, how benign, is Solitude.

—William Wordsworth,
The Prelude

In proportion as our inward life fails
, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office.

—Henry David Thoreau,
Walden

THOREAU
was right. Whenever I am frustrated, miserable, thwarted, I’ll open my in-box twice as often. But this is not my in-box’s fault. It’s mine. My need for distraction is tied to my emotional state. The unopened incoming message is always the best one; its only content is promise. W. H. Auden described this same love of forthcoming letters in his poem “Night Mail,” where he meditates on the effect of a mail train running from London to Scotland:

And none will hear the postman’s knock

Without a quickening of the heart.

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

In fact, I don’t expect to find anything so very extraordinary in my in-box at all. But the act of calling up the mail itself is a solace. And I can call it up whenever I choose, unlike the locals waiting for Auden’s mail train, who knew they couldn’t control its arrival time and so would have put the idea of new messages from their head for much of the day. To check my mail I issue just a click, no commitment at all, and there in the indefinite moment when the e-mail is called forth, I feel the jolt of hope, all in a secret instant where I may have received something wonderful, my gray little life may be changed. Sometimes I think that is the only real moment when I relax, when the world’s voice has not quite arrived and I can watch those messages load.

I never used to think this behavior meant I was turning into a stimulus junkie. But then, one day, I forced myself to count the number of times I compulsively checked the status of my in-box. Answer: fifty-two. And what was I looking for there? I go for pure distraction from my duties, certainly, but it’s also true that some part of me has an oversize expectation of the messages therein. My eight-year-old self saw the mailman as a bringer of daily gifts, and my adult self is similarly enamored of unopened missives. Psychologists have a term for behavior like mine: “operant conditioning.” It’s a phrase, coined by B. F. Skinner in 1937, that describes any voluntary behavior that is shaped by its consequences. At its most basic level, operant conditioning implies that a creature will repeat an activity that produces positive rewards (sugar cubes for horses, bingo winnings for humans, and so on). But then comes the insidious part: the “variable interval reinforcement schedule.” Studies show that constant, reliable rewards do not produce the most dogged behavior; rather, it’s sporadic and random rewards that keep us hooked.
Animals, including humans, become obsessed
with reward systems that only
occasionally
and
randomly
give up the goods. We continue the conditioned behavior for longer when the reward is taken away because surely,
surely,
the sugar cube is coming up next time. In my case, I need to receive only one gratifying e-mail a month (praise from an editor, a note from a long-lost friend) before I’m willing to sift through reams of mundane messages in the hopes of stumbling on another gem.

I’m not sure I’m as far gone
an e-mail junkie as the average American office worker, who in one depressing report was found to be managing her e-mail for a quarter of each day. But let’s say I’m enough of a distraction addict that a low-level ambient guilt about not getting my real work done hovers around me for most of the day. And this distractible quality in me pervades every part of my life. I once asked a friend to keep tabs on how many times I looked away from the book I was reading. He told me I glanced away from that particularly good Alan Hollinghurst novel an average of six times every page. The distractions—What am I making for dinner?, Who was that woman in
Fargo
?, or, quite commonly, What
else
should
I be reading?—are invariably things that can wait. What, I wonder, would I be capable of doing if I weren’t constantly worrying about what I
ought
to be doing? And how content might I become if I weren’t so constantly sure that the mailman has my true, far more glamorous life in that bag?

I am certain my childhood brain was less distractible than my adult brain. I have a distinct feeling that I’ve lost some ability to remain attentive to a book or given task. Who was that boy who read all of
Jurassic Park
in a single sitting in the cloister of his parents’ living room? Who was that teenager who, sailing through the Gulf Islands one August, simultaneously whizzed through
Great Expectations
and (sigh) memorized every word of the
Sunset Boulevard
libretto? And who is this frumpy thirty-something man who has tried to read
War and Peace
five times, never making it past the garden gate? I took the tome down from the shelf this morning and frowned again at those sad little dog-ears near the fifty-page mark.

• • • • •

When the film critic Roger Ebert died, I reread an essay of his from a May 2010 issue of the
Chicago Sun-Times
. In it, Ebert describes his faded love for nineteenth-century novelists—Austen and Dickens and Dostoyevsky. For years, “I would read during breakfast, the coffee stirring my pleasure in the prose.” He read them all, spent hours at a go in their complicated worlds. But then he dropped the breakfast and dropped the reading, too. Novels became something one used to fill up transatlantic flights. (And then, once an iPad could be loaded with a few seasons of
Entourage,
they weren’t needed there, either.) In the previous year, he had tried to tackle Dickens’s
Dombey and Son,
and although he loved the writing, he kept finding himself incapable of continuing. As it was for me with my
War and Peace,
there always seemed to be something else to do. Deadlines, he shrugged. “Tweeting. Blogging. Surfing.” Ebert found, as do many other damaged Dickensophiles, that “instead of seeking substance, we’re distractedly scurrying hither and yon, seeking
frisson
.” Frisson, in this case, is French for “adorable videos of cats trapped in cardboard boxes.”

Are the luxuries of time on which deep reading is reliant available to us anymore? Even the attention we deign to give to our distractions, those frissons, is narrowing.

It’s important to note this slippage. To remember that those cat videos were not always there. As a child, I would read for hours in bed without the possibility of a single digital interruption. Even the phone (which was anchored by wires to the kitchen wall downstairs) was generally mute after dinner. Our two hours of permitted television would come to an end, and I would seek out the solitary refuge of a novel. And books
were
a true refuge. What I liked best about them was the fact that they were a world unto themselves, one that I (an otherwise powerless kid) had some control over. There was a childish pleasure in holding the mysterious object in my hands; in preparing for the story’s finale by monitoring what Austen called a “tell-tale compression of the pages”; in proceeding through some perfect sequence of plot points that bested by far the awkward happenstance of real life.

The physical book, held, knowable, became a small mental apartment I could have dominion over, something that was alive because of my attention and then lived in me.
¹⁴
I couldn’t perform this magic trick in the company of others, though. I couldn’t enjoy reading at all if there was anyone else present. If my parents or brothers came into the living room when I was reading and stationed themselves with a book on the couch opposite, I would be driven to distraction, wondering what was going on in
their
book, and would be forced to leave the room in search of some quieter psychic hollow.

In the purgatory of junior high school, I spent every recess and lunch break holed up in a wooden stall at the school’s library, reading a series of fantasy novels called DragonLance, which then consisted of several dozen books (I read them all). And I was not so rare in my behavior, either. Many writers, and also the general population of introverts, will take to reading as a form of retreat. Alberto Manguel relates in
A History of Reading
how the novelist Edith Wharton would escape the stultifying rules of nineteenth-century life by reading and writing in her bedroom exclusively. I had my bullies on the playground, but Wharton had the irredeemable constraints of corsets and polite conversation. In R. W. B. Lewis’s biography, she is described as throwing “
a minor fit of hysterics
because the bed in her hotel room was not properly situated.” I’m inclined to agree with Lewis that it wasn’t in a proper position for reading. Any devoted reader knows how important it is to have a proper cave in which to commit the act.

But now . . . that thankful retreat, where my child-self could become so lost, seems unavailable to me. Wharton could shut out distraction in her locked bedroom. Today there is no room in my house, no block in my city, where I am unreachable.

At the end of that Roger Ebert essay, he says he decided to force himself to do the reading that he knew, deep down, his brain wanted and needed. When he gave himself the proper literary diet (and found a room in the house where his Wi-Fi connection failed), “I felt a kind of peace. This wasn’t hectic. I wasn’t skittering around here and there. I wasn’t scanning headlines and skimming pages and tweeting links. I was
reading. . . .
Maybe I can rewire my brain, budge it back a little in the old direction.”

Well, I thought, maybe I can, too. Maybe I can “
fortify the wavering mind
,” as Seneca suggested, “with fervent and unremitting care.”

I made a list of all my current commitments—work projects and personal ones—and started hacking away at that list while refusing any additions. Eventually, if we start giving them a chance, moments of absence reappear, and we can pick them up if we like. One appeared this morning, when Kenny flew to Paris. He’ll be gone for two weeks. I’ll miss him, but this is also my big break.

I’ve taken
War and Peace
back down off the shelf. It’s sitting beside my computer as I write these lines—accusatory as some attention-starved pet.

You and me, old friend. You, me, and two weeks. I open the book, I shut the book, I open the book again. The ink swirls up at me. This is hard.
Why is this so hard?

• • • • •

Dr. Douglas Gentile, a friendly professor at Iowa State University, recently commiserated with me about my pathetic attention span. “It’s me, too, of course,” he said. “When I try to write a paper, I can’t keep from checking my e-mail every five minutes. Even though I know it’s actually making me less productive.” This failing is especially worrying for Gentile because he happens to be one of the world’s leading authorities on the effects of media on the brains of the young—attention deficit is meant to be something he’s mastered. “I know, I know! I know all the research on multitasking. I can tell you absolutely that everyone who thinks they’re good at multitasking is wrong. We know that in fact it’s those who think they’re
good
at multitasking who are the least productive when they multitask.”

The brain itself is not, whatever we may like to believe, a multitasking device. And that is where our problem begins. Your brain does a certain amount of parallel processing in order to synthesize auditory and visual information into a single understanding of the world around you, but the brain’s attention is itself only a spotlight, capable of shining on one thing at a time. So the very word
multitask
is a misnomer. There is
rapid-shifting minitasking,
there is
lame-spasms-of-effort-tasking
but there is, alas, no such thing as
multitasking
. “When we think we’re multitasking,” says Gentile, “we’re actually multi
switching
. That is what the brain is very good at doing—quickly diverting its attention from one place to the next. We think we’re being productive because we are, indeed, being busy. But in reality we’re simply giving ourselves extra work.” A machine may be able to spread its attention simultaneously across numerous tasks, but in this respect, we humans are far more limited. We
focus
. Author Tom Chatfield points out that our rapid-switch attention strategy works perfectly well when we’re checking our e-mail or sending texts about that horrible thing Susan wore last night, but

when it comes to the combination
of these “packets” of attention with anything requiring sustained mental effort, however, our all-round performance rapidly decays. According to internal research from Microsoft, for example, it took workers an average of a quarter of an hour to return to “serious mental tasks” after replying to email or text messages.

The multitasking mind, having abbreviated any deep deliberation it was set to undertake, is therefore more likely to rely on rote information and mechanical analysis. Yet look at the multitasker in action. He or she appears to be a whir of productivity, not some slave to mindless responses. Phone (and cappuccino) held aloft while crossing the intersection—barely avoiding a collision with that cyclist (also on the phone)—the multitasker is in the enviable position of
getting shit done
.

We can hardly blame ourselves for being enraptured by the promise of multitasking, though. The tunnel vision involved in reading, say,
War and Peace
is deeply unnatural; meanwhile, the frenetic pace of goofing around on the Internet has a nearly primal attractiveness. This is because computers—like televisions before them—tap into a very basic brain function called an “orienting response.” Orienting responses served us well in the wilderness of our species’ early years. When the light changes in your peripheral vision, you must look at it because that could be the shadow of something that’s about to eat you. If a twig snaps behind you, ditto. Having evolved in an environment rife with danger and uncertainty, we are hardwired to always default to fast-paced shifts in focus. Orienting responses are the brain’s ever-armed alarm system and cannot be ignored.