Hasty and Superficial Rhythm

Turn your head in any direction and you’ll see half a dozen people pushing buttons on a smartphone, round a corner and bump into three others tense with passive-aggressive phone whining, while everyone else is walking and texting. Don’t let’s even look at what the adjacent drivers are doing with their phones. Meanwhile, up in the rarified air of executive boardrooms Apple is besieged by complaints about the new iPhone 5 at the same time that the Samsung Galaxy S111 gathers accolades and market share. And while these two companies taunt, bicker and sue over what is in the long run really only money, twentieth-century diarist, Anaïs Nin, who would not have known what a smartphone is mumbles in her grave.

“The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. ...This thought has made me more and more attentive to all encounters, meetings, introductions, which might contain the seed of depth that might be carelessly overlooked.

“This feeling has become a rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people, more people, more countries. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us. The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision.” — The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4, May 1946