It is harder than it seems to accurately and evocatively “see” the world through a character’s eyes. It is even harder if your own eyes are so often fixed on a tiny screen that you barely register what is actually happening in front of you. I have seen people walk into traffic while scrolling on their phones. I have nearly walked off a sidewalk platform that suddenly came to an end because I was scrolling on my phone. I know, everyone knows, that traffic accidents have happened because of people screwing around on their phones.
But there are more subtle effects. Fifteen years ago, even ten years ago, when I took a long walk, either in the city or in the natural world, it was a kind of mediation that happened without my trying. I became wholly absorbed in what was around me, in textures and shapes, in the human imprint of buildings, sidewalks, backyards, grasses, trees, fungus, worn roads, crushed leaves. It was a profoundly calming and rejuvenating reminder of the greater world and my own animal connection with it. When I go for walk now, it is different: even if I only look at my phone once or twice, the experience, while still soothing, is not as deep. My consciousness is kept from full absorption in the physical world by its neurological attunement to the electronic portal in my pocket — or back in my house, if I didn’t even bring the thing with me. My bodily connection to the environment is thus weakened. And I cannot believe I am the only one being affected in this way.
I think, watching these children from afar, that almost none of them are going to conceive the next Pet Sounds or Song of Solomon or Mulholland Drive. For all the obsessing modern parents do over the fates of their children, they’re happy to toss out an iPad or a smartphone or a Nintendo Switch and let their boys and girls melt, slowly, in the blue light. A person close to me once suggested that wardens should start giving prisoners iPhones because there’s nothing that will more rapidly pacify an unruly and restless population. If iPhones were teleported back in time to the twentieth century, would we have a twentieth century? Much of the mass culture then, high and middle, was birthed, with little exaggeration, in unremarkable New York City public schools. Here’s one era: Paul Simon (Forest Hills HS ‘59, with Art Garfunkel), Carole King (James Madison HS ‘58), Barbra Streisand (Erasmus Hall HS ‘59), Neil Diamond (Lincoln HS ‘58, and attended Erasmus with Streisand), Barry Manilow (Easten District HS ‘61), David Geffen (New Utrecht HS ‘60), and Tony Visconti (New Utrecht HS ‘60). Gerry Goffin went to the more selective Brooklyn Tech and graduated in 1957. Lou Reed grew up in the nearby Long Island suburb of Freeport and graduated Freeport High in 1959. If you’re looking for literary lions, the city public schools have a few, including Arthur Miller (Lincoln HS ‘32), James Baldwin (attended DeWitt Clinton HS), Cynthia Ozick (Hunter College HS ‘46), and Norman Mailer (Boys High ‘39). This is not an argument for sending your precious offspring to neighborhood New York schools — no school anywhere has magic genius fairy dust to make your child into a generational talent — but it is a reminder that these men and women all had parents who behaved very differently than today’s spiritual technocrats. All of these giants, in their youth, had time to dream — and dream grandly. What kind of time do children have now?
