by Benjamin Harrison
Dramatists relish vicissitude; poets relish solitude
While society keeps moving at a faster subjective rate, the mind of the thinker hasn’t changed much since Jefferson’s 4 mph world two hundred years ago. Technology has made continuous transatlantic “thought” a reality – a professor in England can have an instantaneous exchange of ideas with a lecture hall full of America’s future leaders, who can all but smell the cup of Earl Grey that he’s sipping on while extolling the virtues of quantum theory. However, this modernization isn’t without a downside.
It seems that in this age of digital alchemy, we’ve been muted and veritably turned into stone. By this I mean, the focus has shifted from the ends (i.e., the subject matter) to the means (i.e., the technological wizardry that would even cause Tesla to raise an eyebrow). With so much information being transmitted all of the time, one arrives at a plateau that I like to refer to as sensory disarray.
Sensory disarray is a direct consequence of too much sensory input flooding the senses at one time. The result is that the senses literally cannot keep up with the workload. Critics might argue that certain neural mechanisms have evolved and that our twenty-first century minds are vastly different than the mind of, let’s say, Goethe.
This argument is completely fallacious, however, it’s worth exploring in greater detail because it does contain within a little bit of truth.
It takes millions of years for very simple neural mechanisms to evolve; much less those involved with higher ordered thinking skills or our senses. Since the flow of information has exponentially grown every year for the last twenty, it’s implausible to believe that our brains have completely adapted in a mere generation! Hypothetically, if our brains are fully adapted, then why would the subjective rate at which information flows, appear to get faster and faster? If our senses could actually keep up with this increased stimulation, we wouldn’t subjectively notice a faster rate. In fact, we wouldn’t notice any change at all.
That aside, I agree with the critics that our minds are different than that of, for example, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s mind. Obviously, Goethe had to possess more than a television-commercial attention span to write Faust. This implies that he could, indeed, concentrate—a rare commodity in this day in age. Since Faust is widely considered to be one of the masterpieces of world literature, it must have taken a tremendous amount of perseverance and inspiration. Goethe writes, “One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.”
Ah, solitude. That beautiful, little word that is synonymous in our society with ‘loneliness’ and ‘boredom’. Why does ‘solitude’ today have such negative connotations? Perhaps, in a consumer-based society, everything that is new is equated to being ‘good’. This reasoning extends beyond products and is now equally applicable to people. Most likely, one of the first images that pops into your head when you think of ‘solitude’ is that of an older person, sitting alone, befriended only by the insufferable silence of life slowing down. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Solitude enables introspection, creativity and individuality—without which the world would be even more homogenized than it is. Embrace the moments of solitude, for they are few and far between. Cherish these moments, for they are the only time when one feels the pulse of the world; the only time when one feels really alive.