Monday morning. A weekend of much work and little writing, in which I thought (yet again) to chuck the blog, chuck the computer, and return to Moleskine and ink. I didn’t; I just went to work.
And two comments on my last post, in as many days — I actually had no idea that anyone read this blog, at all, ever. So thank you! I shall blather on, at least for the Nablopomo duration (so I’d better catch up with my one-post-per-day quota).
I was in tech-free mode yesterday, and the day before, for no better reason than what I sometimes perceive to be the utter fragility of computing technology. I don’t mean the physical fragility of the hardware involved — although that, when one is contemplating writing in the salty wind sitting on the rocks of South Mole, for example — can be annoying enough. I mean more the vast, unimaginably complex, worldwide systems that keep everything going so that I can sit at this latop and type this — I just shudder, sometimes, and want to run from it (screaming) as fast as I can. No single word would be going from my brain to this page, if it were not for some system of manufacture and distribution that allows me to have this computer, and use the power supplied to this house, and everything else required. And I have no idea, absolutely no idea, of anything but the vaguest idea of that system (and even that is probably wrong).
That’s the fragility I see in I.T., and it scares me I guess, or at least prompts me to think that writing on paper with ink is somehow less dependent upon all this massive, modern, world.
And that’s the answer I find: that, actually, however a chap like me lives (short of subsistence farming) is inextricably tied up with, forever dependent upon, how everyone else lives. (Oh, sorry about the cliché, I didn’t mean to arrive at such a twee conclusion!)
After which contemplation of where the electrons flow, I shall go now to where the wind flows through the heath, on a stroll that I’ve meaning to take since getting back to W.A. nearly six months ago:
Five years have past; five summers with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard tufts,
>…—Mr. Wordsworth’s Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey