I am the worst kind of modern being, though hardly an atypical one: a Luddite who relies, every other moment, on technology. I live 8,000 miles from my bosses, I communicate with my loved ones through international telephone lines and I get on a 747 every time I need to see the dentist. Yet inwardly I harbour all the superstitions which make me write (as I was trained to do) with pen and paper, turn for information to an old copy of the World Almanac instead of to the internet, and try as much as possible to live in a rural nowhere in Japan, without any means of transportation (other than my feet), or a television I can understand.
Wherein lies my doubt? In many of the obvious fears, I think: that technology, accomplishing everything so fast, can prompt us to prize speed as an end in itself, when many of the experiences I have found most precious are intimate with slowness; that the data which computers make so easily available, move us to crave information more than the capacity to make sense of it; and that the internet as an answer to loneliness may be of less use to someone who is hungry for more loneliness, and more freedom to confront what seems essential.
What I am saying is not that I don't trust machines, but that I don't trust myself with them; that I'm not convinced of my own ability to make the best use of my toys; and that sometimes I worry that they make the lesser parts of life seem too attractive precisely because they are so easily controlled. Of course it's wonderful that I, and millions of others, don't have to slave over counting up receipts, alphabetising references or calling travel agencies, and so have more time for the richer parts of life; but what concerns me is that the time I spend performing all these functions on a machine makes me less patient with questions which don't have answers, or with activities which aren't so neatly organised.
An example: as a writer I have found that working on a computer makes changes so easy that I am never done. The very machine which I expected to make everything go faster ends up making me a slower writer, as I switch a paragraph around and then switch it back, day after day, forever; each new revision taking me farther from the original emotion and impulse which gave rise to the piece, and making the final product a little more metallic, even glassy. Over the years I have trained myself to complete all my drafts on paper, as I did when young, and to pretend that I am typing out a final draft on a Selectric (on which it's too much trouble to make changes). In the same way, I still try to calculate the total cost of my groceries in my head so that I won't be helpless if there is no cash register around. I worry that technology will make me depend on it before I have taken a measure of the consequences, in much the same way that I already can't do without the answering-machine I couldn't even imagine 15 years ago.
When finally I acquired a typewriter in Japan two years ago-for occasional business letters-I almost instantly found that more and more of my time and energy were spent making sure that I had enough correction tape, and wondering what would happen if the supply store was closed, and fretting over what I'd do if the machine went down (technology doesn't teach us how to get by without technology). Travelling a lot has taught me that there is a particular virtue in difficulty (getting to the Himalayas, for example); while spending time in a monastery has reminded me that the deepest pleasures I know are the ones which arise in emptiness, amid nothing more complex than silence and space.
I know, I know; it is technology which has put the Himalayas-and the monastery-within my reach and that computers are only a handy distillation of ourselves. Machines don't trap people; people do. But what all this circles around are the intangibles on which I rest my heart, my soul: technology makes me inclined to ponder suffering on the screen instead of on the street; and technology allows me to do so many things more expediently, that it tempts me to overlook whether I should be doing them at all (following the news, that is, or scrolling for tidbits, or exchanging gossip with distant friends). Our last inventions are so often "but improved means to an unimproved end," as Thoreau wrote in his cabin in the woods 150 years ago. "We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough," (or Monica Lewinsky a new boyfriend). In the same spirit, I can now communicate so easily with friends and relatives around the globe that I don't always stop to think whether I am communicating anything at all; and the very ease with which I can fly to America sometimes lures me away from recalling all the forms of contentment that comes from staying put.
And so I send this essay across the Pacific through a Global Village Power Port modem; and take a bus to the Tsutaya Culture Convenience Club to rent the latest video; and I thank the heavens daily for the ways in which technology has made our lives healthier and safer. I get my cash from machines, I heat my lunch in them, and I tell myself that these new forms of wealth aren't impoverishing me. Yet I can't say that I'm a better person for any of this, and I'm not convinced that my life is any kinder or deeper than in the days when I had to amuse myself in an empty room and hand-deliver the pieces I had written in a scrawl, and count the cost of living too far from the ones I love. Technology, I fear, will cause me to exult so loudly in all the things I can do that I fail to attend to all the things I can't.
