In Praise of Messy Lives (24 page)

The dark idea here again is that children are the best excuse in the world not to pursue happiness, not to live fully or take risks or attempt the work one loves. The compromises we make are justified, elevated, and transfigured by the fact of children, and this can be a relief. And Dyer’s point is interesting in that it is not that
children transform vibrant, ambitious, desiring people into juice-box-carrying automatons, but rather that the juice box carrying offers a socially acceptable escape from all that troublesome vibrancy.

But these speculations aside, Badinter’s impressive imperative to own one’s life, to take rigorous and energetic responsibility, to cast off the silly or cowardly or frivolously domestic ways, seems very appealing, and refreshing and brisk. One wishes at the end not to displease or disappoint her, to live up to her lofty ideals, to really try to inhabit her ennobling vision, though one’s two-year-old, the little
enfant-roi
, is calling for a cookie.

I like to think of myself as only moderately, ordinarily addicted to the Internet. I don’t have an iPhone. I don’t have a BlackBerry. I don’t have an iPad. I am barely involved with Facebook, and can’t stand Twitter. But as I think about sitting down to write a book, I do wonder what it would be like to have uninterrupted hours of work—long, luxurious stretches of time, unbroken by dipping into the Internet, skimming through an article, scanning email, buying groceries. To be working, in other words, like it was 1975. Dylan Thomas once wrote, “The summer talked itself away,” and I am a little bit afraid of having to say, some months from now, “The fall emailed itself away.”

Hence my resolve: What if I spent the time I was supposed to be working and concentrating, working and concentrating? What if I didn’t have the great beguiling luminous territory of the Internet to escape to whenever the sentences got a little slow or tricky?

The semi-revolutionary idea of going offline in a very modest and moderate way seems like a reasonable one. I won’t vanish, dysfunctionally, off the face of the earth; I will just check my
email, once a day, for fifteen minutes. I envisage this useful and not entirely radical experiment lasting a week—which is not, after all, a huge, unmanageable eternity.

A man I meet at a party tells me about a software program called Freedom. It asks you how long you would like to be offline (i.e., free) and you tell it, and then it disables your computer so you can’t get on to the Internet for that time—or, in its words: “Freedom locks you away from the internet.” If you should suddenly need to go on the Internet, you can restart your computer and disable the program, but it offers that extra bit of resistance; it is the superego, the self-control that you don’t quite have. The name of the program has to be part of its success; it plays on our hidden desires, the better self we are hoping for, links the program in our heads to revolutions, Arab Springs, Thomas Jefferson. And yet the name also pleasantly and politely hints at another word: “enslavement.” What is frightening is the lack of control implied by this program, the total insufficiency of will when it comes to the Internet. Its generally upbeat vibe gestures toward a certain underlying desperation. I particularly like its slightly Orwellian formulation on the website: “Freedom enforces freedom.”

I agree with the man at the party that this seems in many ways exactly what I need, and yet, somehow (and this may be stubborn and unreasonable and unmodern of me), freedom seems like something I should not have to buy and download. (There is also a less intense version of the Freedom program, called Anti-Social, which disables your email but allows you onto the Internet. And again, I feel that if I am going to be antisocial, I should be able to do it on my own.)

Of course, the very existence of a program like Freedom,
which outsources discipline and restraint, reveals that these portals, these openings, these trivial little chances to slip into another world are an addiction. They are as powerful an escape in their own way as a couple of cocktails at the end of the day were to another generation, and probably no healthier.

The inventor of Freedom, Fred Stutzman, told a
New York Times
reporter, “We’re moving toward this era where we’ll never be able to escape from the cloud. I realized the only way to fight back was at an individual, personal level.” This sweet-looking, bearded, former information and library science graduate student, whose picture of himself on his website has him carrying a baby in a BabyBjörn, is using the language of battle, the idiom of war. The question is who we are fighting if not ourselves?

Freedom from distraction may be the new, sought-after bourgeois luxury. In his essay “The Joy of Quiet,” Pico Iyer says that the future of travel lies in “black hole resorts” where you pay exorbitant amounts for remote beautiful rooms that are offline. The principle is that freedom from the Internet is so rare and exotic and impossible that it is becoming a commodity: it’s not iPhones or iPads we have to worry about buying, but peace from them.

I don’t generally go in for hysterical visions of technology, but when you start to think about it, the ubiquity of screens, the incessant escape from one place into another, the secret passageway of iPhones and BlackBerrys, the glazed, ubiquitous expression I-am-here-but-I-am-not-here, is a little unseemly. It begins to seem like we don’t use the Internet; it uses us. It takes our empty lives, our fruit fly attention spans, and uses them for its infinite glittering preoccupations. Say your train of thought, as
you are reading to your baby, goes something like this: “Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon. J. Crew summer sale 20% off, can you turn in the piece by Friday? Apologies, xx, should we meet at 6:00 at your place? Goodnight bears. Goodnight chairs.” This moment suddenly seems to contain within it the entire decline and fall of civilization, or, at the very least, is a little unfair to the baby. Though perhaps he understands. My own baby, for instance, loves screens with such a great consuming passion that he has already torn two computer keys off two different keyboards.

At first I am edgy, jittery, like I need something to do with my hands. I guess this is what withdrawal feels like. I remind myself that there is nothing interesting on my email. But the problem is not that I am waiting for a specific email, but rather the feeling of being connected, the cosmic buzz of being available to the world, the open line to anyone; it’s not, in other words, the content that matters, but the state itself. And this is what is alarming to me, because I do sort of harbor the retrograde idea that I should occasionally be in the room with the people I am in the room with (or the book, or the piece of work, or the thoughts in my head).

I am basically experiencing the uneasiness of city people in the country, where the quiet, the lack of ambient street noise, is unsettling, where they are literally thinking, “Where are the sirens, the couple arguing, the car radio, the truck engine?” All the mundane, trivial noise that you always want to block out is suddenly missing, and the crickets or cicadas or birds are only drawing
attention to how unnaturally still it is, and how far away you are from civilization.

Here is my computer, here is a stack of books piled next to me, here is a cup of coffee, here is the sun streaming into the parlor windows—ideal working conditions, some might say, and yet I haven’t opened a document. It occurs to me that maybe this experiment isn’t excellent for my concentration, as I am concentrating mostly on not going online. And then I think about how easy it is to check your email. Just one click, and no one is looking. I think to myself, “No one will know, and it will just be this one time.”

I am suddenly desperately, helplessly consumed with the need to order diapers online, and check the front page of the paper, find a map for the restaurant I am going to for dinner, look at the weather for the next ten days, the hourly weather for today; and then there is the intriguing prospect of email, and then, when I look up, two hours have passed.… I see now why one writer I talked to goes upstate, where his coverage is spotty, so he can’t go on the Internet. I remember suddenly that I wrote my entire last book in a cubicle in the New York Public Library, without wireless. There may be no hope for me. At the end of the day I pretend to myself that I was not actually cheating. I tell myself that it takes a little longer to get used to the idea than I thought, and that the suddenness of going offline in one day was too ambitious and, ultimately, not constructive.

I admit to myself that I am cheating. I am actually like an addict sneaking off to the roof for a cigarette, cheating. After spending
a long, guilty stretch checking my email, I go on Facebook. One of my Facebook friends is a stylish and subversive woman who likes to put up pictures of monkeys, with captions like “so much awesomeness” or, about another surrounded by monkeys, “Mr. Popular.” She has no children, and is satirizing the way other people post pictures of their babies. For a moment, I appreciate the satire, the metacommentary, and her own ever stylish relation to ordinariness, and then I am disgusted with myself, with Facebook, and with the awesome monkeys.

It’s the weekend, and so I am not confronted with the computer screen, with the emptiness at the heart of things, with my total inability to deal with solitude, because there are people around all the time.

I am not actually cheating today, but things feel sort of flat, sort of barren. It is not that my email is that exciting, but that there is always the possibility that something exciting will arrive, and it is the possibility that is hard to surrender. What am I missing? It’s the highly theoretical connection to everyone under the sun. There is an enforced quality to my work, like I am working, but in a clean, well-lit jail. Actually, this feels less like freedom than www.macfreedom.com.

I look up at the time and notice that I have been working for hours without remembering the sacrifice of the Internet; I am not feeling it beckoning me; I am not feeling restless, or experiencing the nagging sensation “Where is everybody?” This is more like an almost drugged calm, like I imagine other, healthier people feel after yoga. The hours go by and I don’t miss the newspaper, or the world, or the invitation to a party. I am working. Finally: uninterrupted.

I feel the reclusive, perfect, pleasurable peace I imagine in someone who has gone to an ashram by the Ganges. If Virginia Woolf were alive in this century, she might have added that to truly concentrate you need £500 and a room of your own, without wireless. I am alone with my thoughts, and somehow don’t feel alone with my thoughts. I don’t miss the hum of connectedness. But then, of course, at the end of the day, the gold light in the maple outside my window, I do think to myself that it has been a week, and there’s no need to be obsessive, or overly dramatic, or excessively misanthropic, and just one click won’t hurt …

The other morning I woke up to several emails saying “Sorry about Mrs. C.” or “Don’t worry about Mrs. C.” I was not worried about Mrs. C., since I had no idea what they were talking about. I did know that Mrs. C. was the wife of a famous novelist.

By the time I finish my coffee I have a dozen messages—“Wow. Mrs. C.”—and soon people I haven’t talked to in a decade are messaging me on Facebook, “What’s up with Mrs. C.?” I get the sense that Mrs. C. is saying something about me on Twitter when a neighbor stops on the street to tell me that he saw Mrs. C. retweeted by someone else.

Indeed, it’s beginning to seem like everyone I have ever stood next to in an elevator suddenly harbors a great desire to talk to me about Mrs. C. They want to hear what I have to say about Mrs. C. How do I feel about Mrs. C.? The only thing I know for sure, by this point, is that half of New York City is very closely following the Twittered moods of Mrs. C.

I had written a long piece on sex and the American male writer that had briefly touched on Mr. C.’s work, a year ago, but other than that I did not know Mrs. C. Apparently another piece I
wrote had reminded Mrs. C. of that piece I wrote a year ago. Someone somewhere across the world is fomenting a revolution against a repressive regime on Twitter, but Mrs. C. is a little cranky about her Sunday paper.

Later I come across an article in a New York newspaper: “Mrs. C. and Katie Roiphe in Twitter Battle.” A Twitter battle! Wouldn’t this be a better battle if I were, say, on Twitter? (I do technically have a Twitter account that I have never once used. That Twitter account was set up by my seven-year-old, who set up her own account, @icoolirock, and then set up mine so that she could have a follower, since I don’t let her have strangers following her, meaning, basically, that her love for certain floppy-haired boy singers will have to remain, for now, a secret from the world.)

Soon news of the battle between me and Mrs. C. seems to have spread to other websites: Mediabistro, TheAtlantic.com, NPR.org, NewYorker.com, SFBayAreaObserver.com, The Awl. Even I am not interested enough in Mrs. C.’s tweets to actually read them, and yet here they are spreading across the Internet. A slow news day, maybe?

What I found most intriguing is the question of why remote acquaintances would be interested in calling Mrs. C. to my attention. Many things may have happened in the intervening decade since I had spoken to them, but none had awakened in them the sudden desire to talk to me the way Mrs. C.’s vicious tweeting did. I’ve noticed the same phenomenon with a scathing review: people who are not my friends suddenly emerging to sympathize, to hear what I think or how I feel about my scathing review. Here, of course, is schadenfreude at work. This is a nervous city, after all, and we like a little of someone else’s downfall with our morning
latte and paper. Of course, this illicit pleasure in other people’s setbacks is nothing new; in his beautiful 1961 essay, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” James Baldwin writes about the “bottomless, eerie aimless hostility that characterizes almost every bar in New York,” with people putting other people down out of “spite, idleness, envy, exasperation.”