Mr. Ravioli

by Adam Gopnik
The New Yorker, Sept. 30, 2002

I tried to get the link, but the article is not fully available on their site. This is such a wonderful and enlightening essay. The author introduces us to his daughter and her imaginary friend Mr. Ravioli who has no time to play or chat... and these are random peices that made me happy.

"Knowing something's made up while thinking that it matters is what all fiction insists on."

"Constant, exhausting, no-time-to-meet-your-friends Charlie Ravioli-style busyness arrived as an affliction in modern life long after the other partss of bourgeois city manners did. Business long predates busyness. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centruies, when bourgeois people were building the institutions of bourgeois life, they seem never to have complained that they were too busy--or, if they did, they left no record of it. Samuel Pepys, who had a Navy to refloat and a burned London to rebuild, often uses the word "busy" but never complains of busyness. For him, the word "busy" is a synonym for "happy," not for "stressed." Not once in his diary does Pepys cancel lunch or struggle to fit someone in for coffee at four-thirty. Pepys works, makes love, and goes to bed, but he does not bump and he does not have to run. Ben Franklin, a half century later, boasts of his industriousness, but he, too, never complains about being busy, and always has time to publish a newspaper orf come up with a maxim or swim the ocean or invent the lighting rod...

"Here two grids of busyness remain dominant: twenty-first-century grid of bump and run, and the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century postmodern grid of virtual call and echo. Busyness is felt so intently here because we are both crowded and overloaded. We exit the apartment into a still dense nineteenth century grid of street corners and restaurants full of ppeople and come home to the late-twentieth-century grid of faxes adn emails and overwhelming incompleteness...

"The crowding of our space has been reinforced by a crowding of our time, and the only way to protect ourselves is to build structures of perpetual deferral: I'll lsee you next week, let's talk soon. We build rhetorical baffles around our lives to keep the crowding out, only to find that we have let nobody we love in..."

The ending flips around and bothers me a lot. More later.