The Feelies

A recent BBC article on 3-D sound brought to mind the feelies and hormone chewing gum in Algous Huxley's brave new world:

"Imagine not only hearing a fly going around your head, but you'll be seeing the fly going around," says the professor.

"And the next thing is for when the fly lands on your nose, somehow, there will be sensors that excite your nose, so you can feel it."

I wonder if the real world will get so boring that we'll wire all of our senses, not just our hearing, up to the i-pods of the future...

Hilaire Belloc

"Look you, good people all, in your little passage through the daylight, get to see as many hills and buildings and rivers, fields, books, men, horses, ships, and precious stones as you can possibly manage to do. Or else stay in one village and marry in it and die there. For one of these two fates is the best fate for every man. Either to be what I have been, a wanderer with all the bitterness of it, or to stay at home and hear in one's garden the voice of God."

I find it ironic that facebook has pages devoted to Neil Postman and Wendell Berry, arguably two of the most profound critics of media and modernity of the last several decades.

ignorance

"In a world of such extended knowledge, ignorance is the fruit of sloth, dissipation, or misguided delusion."

Charles Bridges

silence

Speaking of the press in 1978 before an audience of Harvard graduates, Alexander Solzhenitsyn said,

"...we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: 'everyone is entitled to know everything.' But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1978
"A World Split Apart"

when in doubt...

My pastor suggested the following for when I experience doubt:

Express skepticism openly
Remain in community
Cling to the core of the Gospel

I was encouraged.

From Dorothy Sayers

"...in the world it calls itself Tolerance; but in hell it is called despair... It is the sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for..."

The Six Other Deadly Sins