Modern Worship
Hibiscus Tiger, Bali, Indonesia
by Mike
Nice tiger picture, right? Well, the picture that goes with the quote below was supposed to lead this post, but I just couldn’t bare to put it in plain sight. It’s hidden behind the Not Safe For Work cut.
The following is a quote from Steppenwolf (1929) by Hermann Hesse. There’s this ongoing (semantics-heavy) debate in travel circles about the difference between a “traveler” and a “tourist.” Here’s what I think: nobody with a cell phone is traveling. That’s all I’ll contribute to the debate at this point. Here’s Hesse:
We talked, too, of her nephew and she showed me in a neighboring room his latest hobby, a wireless set. There the industrious young man spent his evenings, fitting together the apparatus, a victim to the charms of wireless, and kneeling on pious knees before the god of applied science whose might had made it possible to discover after thousands of years a fact which every thinker has always known and put to better use than in this recent and very imperfect development. We spoke about this, for the aunt had a slight leaning to piety, and religious topics were not unwelcome to her. I told her that the omnipresence of all forces and facts was well known to ancient India, and that science had merely brought a small fraction of this fact into general use by devising for it, that is, for sound waves, a receiver and transmitter which were still in their first stages and miserably defective. The principal fact known to that ancient knowledge was, I said, the unreality of time. This science had not yet observed. Finally, it would, of course, make this “discovery,” also, and then the inventors would get busy over it. The discovery would be made – and perhaps very soon – that there were floating round us not only the pictures and events of the transient present in the same way that music from Paris or Berlin was now heard in Frankfurt or Zurich, but that all that had ever happened in the past could be registered and brought back likewise. We might well look for the day when, with wires or without, with or without the disturbance of other sounds, we should hear King Solomon speaking, or Walter von der Vogelweide. And all this, I said, just as today was the case with the beginnings of wireless, would be of no more service to man than as an escape from himself and his true aims, and a means of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of distractions and useless activities. But instead of embarking on these familiar topics with my customary bitterness and scorn for the times and for science, I made a joke of them; and the aunt smiled, and we sat together for an hour or so and drank our tea with much content.
Tags: bali, hermann hesse, modernity, presence, steppenwolf, technology, tiger, travel philosophy
The interesting thing for me is that while I usually travel with laptop, phone etc, it’s when I’m on the touristing that I realize what a total waste of time they are. I’m not talking about anything profound here, just that when I’m not working, and I finish an hour spent on my computer surfing the web or whatever, I look back and thing “wow that was a wasted hour.” This probably happens when I’m at home too, it’s just that when I’m on vacation that I have more hours to waste, so I notice it.
On my most recent vacation, I got a Kindle, which I think is actually a pretty good compromise. It has a web browser, but it sucks, so you can’t really surf with it. You can do email in a pinch. It’s great, GREAT, for books and good for magazines too. It even does a passable job with newspapers — although I’m sure you, Mike, will agree that newspaper border on the time-wasting, and so my half hour spent reading the Times in the morning I have to justify as an indulgence. Hey, I’m on vacation.
Does the Kindle use cell phone… uh… airwaves? In other words, if you’re sitting at a bus station, do you have the option of checking your messages? If so, I think that’s against the spirit of the rule (it’s a rule now). But I can definitely see how convenient it would be to – say – download 10 books about Indonesia for your Indonesia trip. Or even just the Twilight Series so you don’t have that horrible waiting time between books.
Time is a totally different thing when traveling, anyway. One hour spent online is an hour that could be spent with mind-blowing pork or seeing something you’ve never seen before.
The challenge here, I think, is finding a way to apply that sense of wonder & enchantment to your own hometown. Practically impossible, though.