Power Outage

If there is a core insight in the podcast boomlet, it may be that, as much as we enjoy tweeting, texting, watching, writing, reading, and snapping, no Internet-born form has supplanted the potency of conversation.

The other day there was a power outage in my neighborhood. While we had electricity, there was no internet and no television. I was beside myself. It was impossible to get online or watch Wolf Blitzer’s latest “Breaking News” report.

Once again I was reminded how much we, or at least, I have come to depend on our technology rich world. I don’t mind being alone with my thoughts or sitting quietly staring into space. But now and then I do like to check into the world.

I began thinking of what I used to do before the arrival of the internet or television. Well, I read a book, magazine or newspaper. And I still do that. So I opened my iPad and began reading what I had already downloaded and then I turned to the printed book I was reading then.

The power outage reminded me of what Haruki Murakami wrote about life before and after the development of the electronic revolution in his story “Town of Cats,” published in The New Yorker.

By setting the story in 1984, before cell phones and e-mail and the Internet had become common, I made it impossible for my characters to use such tools. This in turn was frustrating for me. I felt their absence slowing down the speed of the novel. When I thought about it, though, not having such devices at the time—both in daily life and in the story—ceased to be an inconvenience. If you wanted to make a phone call, you just found a public telephone; if you had to look something up, you went to the library; if you wanted to contact somebody, you put a stamp on a letter and mailed it. Those were the normal ways to do those things. While writing the novel (and experiencing a kind of time slip), I had a strong feeling of what the intervening twenty-seven years had meant. Sorry to state the obvious, but maybe there’s not much connection between the convenience of people’s surroundings and the degree of happiness they feel.

I would have enjoyed talking to someone, but no one was around for most of the day. Indeed it would have been an unusual day to have a real conversation without the interminable distractions that occupy so much of our life now.

On his blog, Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp describes how he once spent a day in conversation. “For the first time in a long time I spent most of my waking hours on Saturday in conversation.” This was not your ordinary hello-goodbye talk, but rather a serious exchange of ideas about literature.

It was a give and take of “memories, thoughts and stories” as he describes it. It wasn’t a monologue or the least bit strident. In the morning he spent two hours with a teacher he had 46 years ago. He says she was as sharp as she was when he took an English class with her in high school. They talked about “books, old friends and the ongoing decline of Western Civilization.”

In the afternoon he spent more than seven hours talking with a couple, both artists, who have been his friends for 41 years. “The talk was effortless and never stopped.”

After describing the day he turns to Boswell who reports “the great man" [Samuel Johnson] saying, “The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression.”

When was the last time you spent a day like this? When was the last time you had conversations like this?