to Adam of Gopnik

Last bit of response to Mr. Ravioli...

New Yorkers cannot rewind time. The also cannot keep up with their world and live in technological darkness a the same time. But this is no reason to sacrifice their core humanity and negate themselves by deprivation of emotional interaction and closure of thought.

Preceding all ideas for compromise and change in this area must come an awareness. An awareness of the human need, an awareness of the society and lifestyle that deprives that; an awareness that settling for an incomplete life is settling for no life at all. With this awareness ever present, practical changes can occur. Attempting technological doses in smaller measures, and making time for what is important are a start. Shutting off the cellphone, replacing an email with an actual meeting, and coming to a definite decision at the end of that meeting are all beginnings to a middle path of sanity. But above all, New Yorkers must want that sanity. They must realize that settling for "Mr. Raviolilike" moments, creates a big bubble of nothingess, which they are trying to call life.

”However baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make.”
Herman Melville (1819-1891)

Isaac Asimov

"I'm on fire to explain, and happiest when it's something reasonably intricate which I can make clear step by step. It's the easiest way I can clarify things in my own mind."

writing & passion for truth

...and if my metaphors in the lines above have gotten too rich and too mixed it is probably because my passions have heated up in this hunt for the truth. Samuel Johnson says not to worry since truth will take care of itself and poor writing will sink from view.

Donald M. Hassler

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.

Monday.

by Primo Levi
a Jewish Italian holocaust survivor

Is anything sadder than a train
That leaves when it's supposed to,
That has only one voice,
Only one route?
There's nothing sadder.

Except perhaps a cart horse,
Shut between two shafts
Ad unable even to look sideways.
Its whole life is walking.

And a man? Isn't a man sad?
If he lives in solitude a long time,
If he believes time has run its course,
A man is a sad thing too.