Tempus Fugit

I have been away from writing for  a while, some might say I had been “busy,” and I have been, but mostly I have been distracted by the daily to-and-fro-ing of life.  My life especially, half here, half where?    And there is too much entry-level information swarming around;  in two languages it is very distracting.

Has anyone else practically given up reading books as I have?   We should all shed a tear for what we are missing, even with our Kindles and our  constant connection to the cacophony of Nothing-really-important-but-all-very-interesting-indeed!”   The equation “more info=less knowledge” is terrifying.

There are a lot of people in Italy who don’t read much, if at all.  It is not coincidental that the most extensive initial market saturation of cell phones was in Italy, or am I drawing an unscientific conclusion?  In the area where I live, finding a reader is rare, and even these few have lamented that their electronic connections have all but extinguished the activity  of reading for them, too.  You can leave your spare books on the curb, but nobody will take them.

I titled this collection of small paintings the “Fugue” series, because the scientific definition of the word seems to describe our current predicament poetically.  Not in the musical sense, but in psychiatry, it means “a period during which a person suffers from loss of memory, often begins a new life, and, upon recovery, remembers nothing of the preceding amnesia.”  Or “a dreamlike altered state of consciousness, lasting from a few hours to several days, during which a person loses his or her memory for his or her previous life and often wanders away from home.”   

How will we know what we are missing?  Is what we know inevitably less important

than what we don’t know?  The Italian verb for “to escape” is fuggire.   Tempus fugit!   And since it does, why do we suddenly feel that our lives are as full or fuller than they have ever been, simply for the presence of exponentially-increasing electronic pleasantries?  And Italians are feeling the effects more acutely, I imagine, as their entire incredible history evaporates before their eyes, a  mirage of fading greatness which, like water, is leveling out into a flat, expansive, colorless sea of…nothing much.  It is finding its lowest point, for sure.

I had intended to write about archaeology, and the dig which shaped my early years here.  But in remembering the thrill of digging down through history, I began to wonder if people in the future will repeat it, as the famous saying goes?   If we are too distracted to read through a written account, a book, a few pages, one article…how will we arm ourselves in order to avoid repeating our blunders?   What will we miss?

Will the harpies come and carry us off because we wandered away from home, not caring anymore about what was happening outside of our tiny  corn-fed cosmos?