Close Reads – P.G. Galalis

On the Possibilities of Taking a Walk

One of my favorite novels, Jane Eyre, begins with one of my favorite opening lines:

“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”

A bit further down the page, you learn that ten-year-old Jane is “glad of it.”

It’s a great opening line because it marks the transformation Jane will undergo by the time she’s a young woman, for whom taking walks–whether pacing the hallway, posting a letter in the village, or fleeing illicit and/or ill-advised betrothals–has become a way of life. In fact, walking is one of the ways she’s able to exercise any freedom or agency at all within her constrained life.

This spring, finding myself too-often and too-easily hunched over a screen, I’ve been trying to take daily walks. Sometimes I have a few (slightly misquoted) lines from Wordsworth ambling through my head (“Up, up my friend, and clear your looks, or surely you’ll grow double!”), and I almost always find that Wordsworth is right. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever taken a walk that made anything worse, and a good many have made things better. Of course, Wordsworth was worried about people getting too caught up in their books; one wonders what he would think of our screens.

Wordsworth and his Romantic compatriots were on to something. I doubt it’s a coincidence that they too were in the middle of technological revolution and its consequential cultural upheaval. As we grow more and more constrained by technologies that seduce us with certain freedoms while furtively depriving us of others, we would do well to follow Jane’s example and look for whatever little opportunities there might be for a walk each day–that humble exercise of body, mind, and human freedom.

Postman’s Five Laws of Technology

Technology to most people these days means something with a screen, or maybe anything electronic. Or if someone has a little historical sense, maybe they also take into consideration internal combustion, or even that ancient artifact, the steam engine.

Then again, these days, we’re not very good at thinking about technology, and why should we be, when most of the discourse about technology is driven by the people who sell it to us?

Fahrenheit 2019

In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the antagonist, Beatty, delivers a memorable villain-monologue to the novel’s protagonist, Guy Montag. Montag has begun to have doubts about what they do as firemen–i.e. burn books, which are illegal in Bradbury’s dystopian future. Beatty attempts to set him straight with brief cultural history.

The entire speech, which goes on for several pages, is a tour de force that’s well worth reading in its entirety. (Go on, you know you have an old copy from high school somewhere on your shelves. It’s pages 51-59 in my 2013 Simon & Schuster edition). But here’s one excerpt from Beatty’s speech that knocks my socks off:

Speed up the film, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!
Captain Beatty

Fahrenheit was published in 1953.

1953!

You’d be hard pressed to find a better description of the media culture of 2019.

I’m not one to get caught up in how well (or not) science-fiction predicts the future. That’s not the point. But if Bradbury is prophetic here, it’s not because he’s predicted anything; it’s because he has as sharp an insight into human nature as any writer of the Twentieth (or Twenty-First) Century. Like any good prophet, his words cut deep with painful truths that the culture doesn’t want to hear about itself.

By my count, this passage is 473 characters long, or about four Tweets. The novel itself is relatively short, clocking in under 50,000 words (shorter than Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone). I hope it’s not too long for people to keep reading it.

Our screens certainly don’t want us to. Guy Montag’s screen-addicted wife, Mildred, has her screens on the parlor walls; we have them on our walls, on our laps, in our pockets, under our pillows. It might turn out that paper doesn’t burn at 451-degrees Fahrenheit. Maybe it just combusts into nothingness at the temperature of a warm lithium-ion battery.