—
Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 1948. This sort of leisure is the prey being hunted to extinction by technology in general and the Internet specifically, and it is this leisure which permits the creation of sustaining human meaning.
(via mills)
And, another short selection from mills’ excellent post:
Most are familiar with this reprieve, and as well with the regret one feels as one cedes to the essentially addictive habit upon returning to the world of breaking one’s silence: a post about one’s vacation, perhaps. But worse is that most of us are now unable even to get away; should we be fortunate enough to lose the fetter of an Internet connection, we still insist on taking photographs, ostensibly to record the moment for ourselves but actually because at every step we imagine how our experience might be conveyed, portrayed, broadcast. We interiorize technology as it interiorizes the market’s emphases; we all search for what can be transacted upon, for attention or esteem or approval or money. We blink into a sunset, search for our phone’s camera, and imagine how the photo will play on the screens where our avatar lives, screens belonging to other selves whom we know only as representations.
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So many thoughts come up for me in reading mills’ essay on leisure, one of which is that I hope folks take the time to read the comments too. A few other thoughts, in brief:
1. The documentation he talks about here is something I think about a lot in my days with the babies. Even when I want so much to just be with them, to play and to sing and to learn from them, I find myself reaching for my camera. To document to my family and my friends, to somehow offer proof that these small beings are real, but also to insure against my forgetting the magic of these moments because I have lost my ability to trust my own memories. But I miss things.
2. I imagine that it is dangerous for me to fall into the waters of my mind, so I jump from stone to stone, activity to activity, in order to avoid falling in. It feels like a personal failing or an immunosuppression.
3. We can rationalize anything to claim progress, can’t we?
4. I can be so scared of myself and everyone else.
5. I have been mysteriously compelled to number these items. If each blog post is essentially a rope I toss out to others to hope for a connection, maybe numbers, like links, are small manipulations hoped to make the rope easier to grasp, to hold. But isn’t this a failure of trust? Is organization a kind of capitulation? Even if I find it beautiful?
6. It is, perhaps, a by-product of cultural atrophy that has enabled me to imagine mills as a neighbor, in much the same way my literal neighbors are made possible by the imperialism of the suburban-hungry worker, and thus the rape of the land. Does this suggest the extreme lengths we will go to create neighbor connections, or are these connections only the war-buddy relationships we’ve forged in our commissions of violence, real and virtual?
7. What, then, comes after this?
