The Life-Enhancing Grace of a Few Imagination-Provoking Words — in a Culture Filled Mostly with Amplified Superficiality and Deadening Dross

© 2012 Peter Free

 

27 March 2012

 

 

Patience with aggressive superficiality has never been one of my virtues — that probably makes me an ass, but nevertheless . . .

 

It is refreshing to emerge, occasionally, from our culture’s characteristic dull witlessness to read or hear something brightly nuanced.

 

Like:

 

My wife tucks her phone into her bra, on long walks, and listens to Dickens novels. I find this unbearably sexy.

 

© 2012 Dwight Garner, The Way We Read Now, New York Times Sunday Review (17 March 2012)

 

These two simple sentences combine the individualized quirks of human attraction with the allure of a long-dead man’s gift for writing still-meaningful stories.

 

Mysteries both.  And apparently simultaneously exhibited in author Garner’s perspective on living.

 

 

And how about this one?

 

From the same writer comes another perception-reorienting phrase:

 

I’ve been trying to become more of a grown-up, in terms of my commitment to reading across what media geeks call “platforms” . . . from smartphones to e-readers to tablets to laptops.

 

It’s a battle I may lose. I still prefer to consume sentences the old-fashioned and nongreen way, on the pulped carcasses of trees that have had their throats slit.

 

© 2012 Dwight Garner, The Way We Read Now, New York Times Sunday Review (17 March 2012)

 

 

From that phrase to connecting memory

 

“Carcasses of trees that have had their throats slit.”

 

Put that way, it is hard to avoid coming to grips with the existence of figuratively called tree-souls.  And the sadness that can come with cutting them down, even when for necessary purposes.

 

I recall the sorrow of dispatching a house-damaging plum tree more than 30 years ago.  Gone afterward were the seasonally repeated delight of seeing the scraggly tree bloom and the summer joy of carefully picking its fruit.  Had I the opportunity to go back in time, I would leave it in place and protect the building some other way.

 

We are all connected across remembered time.  It is a pity that it takes age and irrecoverable mistakes to recognize the unity.

 

 

The moral? — Every once in a while, some of us have to come up to breathe the cortical-air provided by gifted communicators

 

Life is too short to meander, head tucked firmly up the metabolic exit-hole, while surrounded by the soul-attacking racket that passes for American civilization.

 

I am grateful to the many people, who have gifts for expressing perceptions and wonder in meaningful ways.