One of the strange and unpleasant things about being away from my cabin is the fact that I can be contacted at any moment, and, being in need of employment, I have nothing particularly better to do; and so I find myself constantly opening my phone, or refreshing my computer screen, like a five-year-old trying to grow potatoes, digging them up every few hours to see if they’ve gotten any bigger. It feels unhealthy and weird; and I must confess that time at the cabin has not strengthened me against temptation; it has only isolated me from it. The center of my being shifts from inside to out; you live in constant expectation of something from outside which can inflect your day.
Pico Iyer wrote a finely-worded piece about this phenomenon in the Times; the writing, I must say, is unusually silky and nice, and its general parabolic purport – disconnection is the route to true connection – is congenial and wise. I will confess, though, that I left the piece with a terrible case of moral indigestion, as I cannot imagine how a man who seems so cultured otherwise could possibly be involved in the first person in so morally repugnant a sentence as the following:
ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.”
If there ever was an event which deserved to be hit by an asteroid I think that was it. (I take back everything negative I ever said about Prophetic Sadism – if there are conferences in the world called “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow,” and the people who attend them can be considered respectable human beings, then as far as I am concerned the Ball of Redemption cannot come fast enough.) I am going to give Mr. Iyer the benefit of the doubt and presume that he came to the conference to thunder against the moral atrocity of preying for your own profit on the innocence of a child.
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