Fire and Knowledge

Stephen Elliott has written an interesting article about spending a month offline. Here are some excerpts:

My first week offline was mostly spent in a state of withdrawal. I suffered from bouts of extreme boredom. I realized I hadn’t been bored in years because I’d gotten in the habit of never giving myself the chance…. It was only in the fourth week that things started coming together. I wasn’t just breaking the Internet habit, I was breaking the habits I had learned on the Internet: that addiction to continual bursts of small information.

I started reading a lot more books, which is good for me since I’m a person who writes books. And I read more challenging books. I would read and write all morning, take a lunch break, and then write until evening. I could feel my attention span lengthening. I would think about problems until I figured them out….

While I was offline, those who really wanted to get in touch with me did so through other means. In fact, when I got back online, the most surprising thing was how little I had missed. I had 370 e-mails but most of them didn’t say anything. The most significant inconvenience of my not using the Internet had nothing to do with people getting in touch with me; it had to do with my needing to reach others.

Being offline for a month is bound to make someone change their online habits. So what did he change?

The first thing I did was replace my blog with an advertisement for my books. Why did I think I needed a blog? I resolved to stay away from MySpace and LiveJournal. I don’t go online on the weekends. Also, I don’t use the Internet while I’m at home. I leave my computer in my office (I brought the word processor home with me). Since I’m most creative in the mornings, I’ve decided no Internet until after lunch. That basically leaves my potential online time as 1 PM to 5 PM during weekdays. But that’s still way more than I need. Most people don’t need to be online four hours a day; most e-mails don’t need an immediate response.

I suggest this as a routine for people who must spend their days in front of a computer and want to accomplish more: Divide your day into online and offline. Studies have consistently shown that people with more screens open get less done. Multitasking slows down productivity.

Always keep score in games, never in love.

–Anne Dillard, “Aces and Eights,” in Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (1983), 169

Almost all writing begins with terrible first efforts.

–Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994), 25.

The great danger of the world that we have built is that it leaves us vulnerable to meaninglessness—to a world where consumption is all that happens, because there’s nothing else left that means anything.

–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), 46

No factual discovery of science (statements about how nature “is”) can, in principle, lead us to ethical conclusions (how we “ought” to behave), or to convictions about intrinsic meaning (the “purpose” of our lives).

–Stephen Jay Gould, “Darwin and the Munchkins of Kansas,” in I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History (2002), 215

When I was a child I actually believed that the purpose of [church] steeples was to attract lightning. I thought hey must be meant to protect all the other houses and buildings, and that seemed very gallant to me.

–John Ames in Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004), 114

Greenland has a new island, which has been named “Warming Island.” Here’s an excerpt from the news article:

The map of Greenland will have to be redrawn. A new island has appeared off its coast, suddenly separated from the mainland by the melting of Greenland’s enormous ice sheet, a development that is being seen as the most alarming sign of global warming.

Several miles long, the island was once thought to be the tip of a peninsula halfway up Greenland’s remote east coast but a glacier joining it to the mainland has melted away completely, leaving it surrounded by sea….

As the satellite pictures and the main photo which we publish today make clear, Warming Island has been created by a quite undeniable, rapid and enormous physical transformation and is likely to be seen around the world as a potent symbol of the coming effects of climate change.

But it is only one more example of the disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet, that scientists have begun to realise, only very recently, is proceeding far more rapidly than anyone thought.

Whether humans are the “main cause” or not, would it really hurt for us to stop being wasteful and polluting our beautiful home?

This use of catch phrases is surely tired. “Right to choose.” “Equal rights for women.” The grandchildren of the sixties are waking up to the vagueness and danger of those phrases. Right to choose what? Anything? All laws that protect children limit the rights of moms (and dads) to choose. You can’t choose to starve them. You can’t choose to lock them in closets for three weeks. You can’t choose to abandon them. You can’t choose to strangle them five minutes after they are born….

Hillary Clinton opposes the Supreme Court decision because “the rights and lives of women must be taken into account.” Yes. That is mainly what this forty-page opinion of the court does. Read it. And it will be interesting whether Senator Clinton will have any opinion about moms and dads who want to abort their little girls, but not their little boys. I think the younger generation may ask the senator: Should the life of little women be taken into account, or only big women?

–John Piper, “Let the Python Eat Its Tail. Amen.,” April 25, 2007