One Person’s Heaven is Another Person’s Hell
My granddaddy was a seeker. A WWII bombardier in the European theater, a test pilot in the 50's, he apprenticed to a famous Yogi before being recruited to work for the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon, and in his later years did amateur medical research while composing speculative fiction scenarios in his head. He could have passed as a character from a Kurt Vonnegut novel. I like to think that he and I were cut from the same cloth.
One day, when I was twelve or thirteen and visiting him, he asked me a hypothetical question that I’ve never forgotten. It went something like this.
If you had to make a permanent choice between the following lives, which would it be? In each case you will spend the rest of your life alone, but are guaranteed all your physical needs (plentiful healthy food, fresh water, comfortable shelter).
- Nature lover. You live out the rest of your days as the only human in an idyllic nature setting, amidst fantastic waterfalls, alpine trails, aquatic sanctuaries, mineral-rich hot springs. You are surrounded by friendly animal life, all the outdoor activities you’ve ever wanted that you can power with your own body, and the freedom to go anywhere, anytime. In this life you are immersed with the world in its purest, most unmolested form. Here you will swim with the dolphins, run with sandpipers, climb with the yaks, gaze with the eagles, howl at the moon and rise with the sun.
- Creative freedom. You spend your life in a windowed chalet high on a mountain peak. You may not leave, but you have all the supplies to produce unlimited works of art–papers and pens for writing, watercolors and oils for painting, clay for sculpting, stringed instruments and percussion, looms, etc. While granddaddy didn’t specify any high technology, we might include 3D printers, laser cutters, lathes, microcontrollers, sensors, and of course, computers…but no Internet. You are isolated, with only the supplies to create new works, and all the time in the world to translate imagination into self-expression.
- Knowledge seeking. Your remaining days will be spent in solitude in a great library, in which all the works of humankind in any medium are available for you to consume at leisure. Of course all your favorite authors’s books are here, and all the books that they loved. Endless non-fiction works that explain all the things that ever mystified you, and the entire back catalogs of every periodical (go back and read the newspaper from the day you were born, or the day Titanic sank). The movies, the exquisitely great ones and the laugh-out-loud bad ones, they’re all here. As are the TV shows, comedy albums, music albums, filmed plays, dance and old radio broadcasts. The games. All here. And nothing else to do but consume them all. Alone.
Which life would you pick, were you forced to select a solitary existence away from the pressures of your peers, or the pressure of financial survival? My granddaddy admitted that for him it was easy: more than anything he wanted to catch up on his reading while he still could. There was so much to learn, to understand, and never enough time.
As an avid reader and media consumer I deeply relate to his limitless appetite to absorb. My mom always counseled me to bring a book with me wherever I went, so that I’d never be bored. It’s advice I’ve passed on to my kids. I treat “annual books completed” as a key metric for living. I’m sometimes manic in my tendency to fill every drive with an audiobook, or push off sleep an extra hour to finish binge watching House of Cards.
But then I also find it something worth resisting. I’m revolted to the idea of being defined by my consumption. At its worst, it is an act of receiving without giving. Of course I know that every author is nothing without an audience; being a member of the audience is a kind of giving back. Accepting a gift ennobles the gift giver, yada yada. But I still can’t shake the feeling that consumption should be a means to some greater end.
In that great Twilight Zone episode Time Enough At Last, Burgess Meredith is a bookworm who manages to survive a nuclear holocaust. He has no problem that all the people in his city have died, for he now has all the time in the world to read his precious books. When he smashes his glasses and is faced with unfettered time but no ability to read, he is utterly destroyed. I read it in part as a sign of the emptiness of consumption for its own sake. As Rod Serling says at the episode’s end:
The best laid plans of mice and men…and Henry Bemis…the small man in the glasses who wanted nothing but time. Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself. Mr. Henry Bemis…in the Twilight Zone.
In literature there may be no greater avatar of the bookish explorer than Jorge Luis Borges, and his story is bizarrely parallel to Burgess Meredith’s character. He said, “I’ve always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” Then, in 1954 at the age of 55, Borges lost his sight, depriving him of his precious books. The short story that the Twilight Zone episode was based on was written just two years before that. We may ask, who was the man and who was the doppelgänger?
Borges, of course, handled his infirmity with far more grace and perspective than the fumbling Henry Bemis. He writes of his blindness:
No one should read self-pity or reproach
Into this statement of the majesty
Of God; who with such splendid irony,
Granted me books and night at one touch.
And we can’t help but remember Borges’ immortal Library of Babel, in which he describes an infinitude of books, stretching on forever in shelves that contain every possible volume, every variation of those same books, every possible combination of error. The library, then, is almost entirely gibberish. Finding a coherent book in such a place is a miracle, and you can spend a lifetime wandering it without finding one.
And yet, here we are back in reality with mountains of deeply meaningful books, rich as lives. How could we not want to immerse ourselves in them?
We remember Borges as a great writer, but he saw it differently: “Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read.”
—
Though it would easy to abandon myself over to such a dream, I’d select the blessing/curse of creative freedom. And merely acknowledging this brings a lot into focus — if this is true then I owe it to myself to protect my creative time from the consumption compulsion. Even more, I feel now an obligation to erect a bulwark against the hailstorm of distractions and obligations that chip away at the mastery of own thoughts.
We’re living in a variation of Borges’ Library of Babel, more and more indistinguishable from the Internets of Plentitude. The only way to keep our head above water across limitlessness content streams — so often filled with gibberish, or variations on the theme — is to become aggressively discriminatory in what we give our time to. It’s no wonder we’ve become expert at dismissing ideas that disagree with our pre-formed views-of-the-world. There are simply too many, and we only have a few minutes to read an article or listen to a song, or watch a video. Discriminating taste — how could that be a bad thing?
It’s particularly irksome for a creative person; almost all new works are ugly things right out of the birth canal. With that discriminatory function turned all the way up we‘re all too likely to abandon our babies as stillborn. It’s only by working through the distaste, and the sneaking sensation that we’re about to bring permanent shame to our family name, that many of us ever get anywhere at all.
While we don’t have such a stark question to answer in our own lives as the one my granddaddy asked, the choices we make about how we spend our time clearly reverberate in deep and disturbing ways.
And sometimes our answers to these questions are sculpted by who is doing the asking. It was my granddaddy who asked this of me, towards the end of his life, not quite regretful but full of self-awareness. My answer to him now isn’t centered in what I’d like to be doing today, but which life (I imagine) I’d rather have lived.
The great challenge, of course, is to erase that distinction.
