It’s been a while since I’ve sent out a blog. I’m afraid it has been a busy year, and I am struggling to keep up with some of my goals. To be honest, I have also dithered quite a bit about how much time I want to spend online at all. Nonetheless, I think I will start creating shorter entries here. Some topics need a lot of words to flesh out, but other times, a line or two is equally weighty.
Here are some words from a recent Paul Kingsnorth article: “Suffer Little Children.” Perhaps it plant a seed.
“It’s a sunny April day when I turn down a small side road near Lough Derg in County Clare on my way back from the morning school run. I’m not really going anywhere, it’s just that I pass this road every morning and I’ve never known where it goes. Sometimes I like to head down lanes and get lost. Getting lost is itself becoming a lost art. Somebody could write a book about it, if anybody still read books; but the art of reading is going the same way as the art of wandering aimlessly. If you want to know where something is today, you just Google it, and the little Satanic Rectangle in your hand obligingly offers up a characterless, inhuman little blue line to follow, precise to the last gigamillimeter, with the help of all the satellites spying on you every second from space. You don’t have to know how to read a map, or even where you are in the landscape. The Machine has your back.
Well, humbug to it. One reason I have neither a smartphone nor a satnav is that I like getting lost. I don’t want Elon’s Starlink to tell me precisely where I am. I reserve the right to know neither where nor who I am, for as long as I damn well like.”