Maybe Sheer Inevitability Is No Excuse

“I want to be alone.”

- Greta Garbo, 1932

I’m having an argument I’m going to lose. My wife wants us to get a cell phone, but I don’t want people calling me while I’m standing in line at the market.

I know the world has changed. I know we’re smack in the middle of the Information Age. I know life has accelerated tenfold and he who dogs it on the High Tech Highway winds up as roadkill. And, yes, I know that Bill Gates is lord.

But I find I have more in common with Garbo than with Gates: I want to be alone. Problem is, solitude is next to impossible in the age of instant communication. Between phones, faxes, cell phones, pagers and e-mail, many of us are now reachable all the time, everywhere and by multiple media.

People keep telling me this is progress. I’m not so sure.

Indeed, there are days when I think “reach out and touch someone” highly overrated. Days when it seems that we have oversold the promise of instant communication. Days when I think we might have sacrificed something that perhaps we should not have.

Are there really that many emergencies? Is there really so much to say?

I confess to being something of a heretic where technology is concerned. More, I confess to having a romantic’s esteem for moments unaccounted, time spent beyond responsibility’s reach.

Now Marilyn wants a cell phone, and, doggone her, she makes a good point: Suppose we’re driving in the country and the car decides to plotz? Of course, she also used the “What if there’s an emergency?” theme last year, when we got a pager. The only time it beeps is when the kids want to know what time she’s coming home from the hair salon. Some emergency.

I find myself nostalgic for a time when information traveled more slowly and it was easy to be out of touch for hours at a stretch. A time when there was no expectation of constant accessibility. Compare that to some woman sitting at a traffic light watching a document feed through her car fax and it is difficult not to feel that something of value has gone out of our lives. The luxury of solitude. Stillness. Peace.

And I don’t know that we can get them back. Several months ago, I found myself with a Saturday to kill in Los Angeles. I got in the car and headed north on Pacific Coast Highway, drove beneath Malibu cliffs as the ocean impaled itself on the rocks below. Drove and kept driving until I was well beyond the hotel, well beyond the city, even well beyond the signal from the radio station.

A feeling of almost sinful pleasure washed over me, growing stronger with each mile beyond. It was a moment before I knew it for what it was: the realization that no one on Earth knew where I was, no one could reach me. I was disconnected, out of touch, on my own, alone. I was unplugged. I hadn’t felt that good since forever.

Or that guilty.

It gnawed at me as I strolled the picturesque streets of Santa Barbara, troubled me as I browsed in a record shop, vexed me as I ate lunch. And it struck me that maybe it’s no longer possible to get beyond. Maybe our years in the communications revolution have re-socialized us, rewired our perceptions such that not only is it difficult to escape the reach of others, but we feel wrong for even trying. So we carry cell phones to the beach, to the movies, to the toilet. Hyperconnectivity has come to seem natural. The plug is not easily removed nor the tether readily broken.

Maybe. All I know is that when I got back to my hotel, I sat at a window overlooking the Coast Highway. Traffic thundered by beneath me, rushing out of the city, rushing north. With one hand, I fired up the computer. With the other, I called home.

xxxx