by Adam Gopnik
For here is the deep truth. There really is no fast. There is no slow. There is only time. Time is immovable; there is only so much of it, and it cannot be nudged or massaged or managed. It is the absolute thing, Time, and it is everywhere, like dust mites and smog.
The Running Fathers sit sipping lattes at the Starbucks on Columbus Avenue after the morning run, waiting with annoyance for two twenty somethings to pack up their computers so there will be free seats. But then what's the rush? When your work is done, they know, you are done. Each creature on earth has more or less exactly the same number of heartbeats, the same track to race around. The hummingbird uses his up in a week, the elephant in a century, but the consciousness, their experience of the time passed, is the same. We are calibrated to have as many heartbeats as we need. It is why retired athletes look dazed and drunken—they are dazed and drunken; they are finished. If you run, you use up your heartbeats. Running around the reservoir is a form of disguised middle-class suicide. It is no accident, a Running Father explains to another, that Mozart died at thirty-five, that Keats passed away at twenty-six: They had harvested themselves, used up their heartbeats. (Seemingly long-lived artists are always film directors or conductors or editors, who are inspired parasites leaching off others’ heartbeats, others’ music.)
The other Running Father nods. He recalls the moment that he got that, too. He was working out on the treadmill once, and pushing as hard as he could to derive the heartbeat-per-minute rate forward, and he ran faster, and then faster, but the heartbeat counter wouldn't move up! It just kept blinking, rising steadily from one to ten, and then falling back down to zero and then back up to ten, and then back down to zero—no matter how hard he pushed, or how much he strained, it would rise up and then fall back.
He thought that maybe he was having the beginnings of a heart attack until he realized that … he was looking at the wrong display! He wasn't looking at the heartbeat-per-minute rate. He was looking at the seconds ticking by on the digital timer—and they were so perfect, so smooth, so completely unchanging, so completely indifferent, that he was terrified. Nothing he did affected the polite, impassive digits, moving majestically onward.
“I just stopped running, and I was standing there sweating, just staring at them, and the heart rate went swooshing down to normal, but the second counter, the little digital clock, just went right on blinking, just imperturbable, like a child looking up at you, innocent and unaffected. And I realized what it was, and …” They nod together and sip: There is no fast. There is no slow. There is only time.
Why, then, do they run? They have learned from the trainer that running is futile; they have gathered from their wives that running is unnecessary; they have heard from their children that running is over; they know from their own knees and ankles that running is a pain. Given the realities of the body, the recalcitrance of the muscles, the illusion of aerobics, the fact that time is running out and heartbeats are being used up, why run at all? Why do we still see them, heads down, arms awkward, running around the reservoir every morning before work, every evening before dinner? Their knees ache and their lungs burn and they know that none of it helps anything. Knowing better, why do they persist? It is, perhaps, not exercise at all, not even a waste of heartbeats, that drives then forward, however clumsily. They are not racing to get anywhere, or rehearsing to overtake their competitors, or running to become faster runners tomorrow. They are not running in search of something, or toward someplace, or against someone. They are running away.
Fourth Thanksgiving: Propensities
Our children live in mazes / made of cards and screens and pages”—a description of the new reality in doggerel. The children do live in a maze of cards and screens and pages, and half our job as parents seems to be to guide them through it, particularly to keep them away from the screens, turn them toward the cards, and help them end up in the pages. The path from video addiction to book reading is a thorny one, a parental pilgrim's progress for our time.
This weekend, for instance, Luke and his friend Theo had a double sleepover: Friday night at Theo's family's loft in funky downtown, then Saturday night here, prissy uptown. Theo's dad, Peter Hoffman, and I decided, along with the boys, that it would be a no-screen weekend. Of course, when I say that we decided all together, I mean that the parents decided and the children, not yet having the weapons to contest it, accepted the decision and pretended they had helped to make it. Families remain autocracies, with the saving grace of all autocracies—not dictatorships where anything goes, but authoritarian centers that keep a jumpy and watchful eye on the mob, which will someday rule.
“No computer games? No video games?” The boys looked hurt as much as offended. No, nothing, we said. They spend too much time staring at screens; this would be the weekend to do something energetic and creative. “What are we going to do?” Luke asked—not indignant, just curious. What were they going to do? “Play music, do sports,” we said. They looked dubious, and then they went downtown.
Once before, they had used a no-screen weekend imaginatively, to hold a fire sale of old Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. They both have outgrown the game in the past year and now view their beautiful old Rackhamish cards with disdain and the kind of disbelief about their enthusiasms of seven months ago that we have for pictures of ourselves in decades past—that haircut! those clothes! Childhood is just like life, only ten times faster. One of the reasons we still idolize the music of the sixties is that it moved at a genuinely childlike pace: Every six months the Beatles and Dylan had entered an entirely new moment, and what they had done a year ago in “Help!” or “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” seemed as distant and incomprehensibly naive to them as Yu-Gi-Oh! now seems to Luke.
When the boys came back to our place after the first half of the sleepover, late on Saturday afternoon, their faces and eyes were alight.
“Hey, what did you guys do?” I asked semi-warily.
“We played pool!” they announced in unison, and then explained that Peter had taken them to a local pool hall—called, in deference to Wall Street faux-proletarian sensibilites, Soho Billiards but still, a pool hall—and taught them how to use a cue and rack 'em up. Then Peter had left them there among the slant-eyed sharks, and they had filled the afternoon learning the game.
“We got good,” Luke said, eyes shining. “I think we could become, like, pool hustlers and all. I really do, Dad. You know, the kind of people who make you think they don't know how to play, and then they do?” (New York has made him into a “high” talker, ending every statement with the intonation of a question.)
I beamed with pleasure and relief. They had played pool! Pool hustlers! What could be better than learning how to adjust a cue to strike a ball into a pocket, as compared to another meaningless two-hour session in front of a screen doing mindless hand-eye–coordination games? They were not druggishly indulging in a cynically engineered entertainment. They were in touch with Americana, with history! With Jackie Gleason and Paul Newman in The Hustler, and with Seymour and Buddy Glass, for whom pool was a “Protestant reformation” in their New York lives. How wise we had been to make the screens off-limits, for it had led them to the billiard table and the pool hall! This is going well, I thought, and I told Martha about it.
She looked puzzled. “Wasn't pool sort of like the video game of nineteen-aught-three?” she asked. “I mean, isn't that what they get so exercised about in The Music Man?‘Trouble right here in River City, Trouble with a capital “T” and it rhymes with “P” and it stands for pool,’ or however the hell it goes? It sounds like instead of letting them do mindless crap, you're getting them to do dated mindless crap.”
“Yes,” I conceded. “But that was … different.” I couldn't say how, but I was convinced that it was.
That evening, staying at our house, the boys disappeared into Luke's room, where we keep the piano and the guitar. I heard banging and playing of various kinds. The next morning, when Peter came over to pick up Theo, they invited every
one to listen.
We all trooped in. “Listen to this, Dad,” Theo said. They sat down: Luke on piano, Theo on guitar. Nods and mature headshakes, and then a solid, slightly out-of-order, but utterly rocking version of “Purple Haze” emerged from their fingers and their throats. They got it all: the stuttering bit at the beginning, the swoop in the middle, and the key slurrings of pronunciation, so that “ 'scuse me while I kiss the sky” became “ 'scuse me while I kiss this guy.” Theo sang it right, too—stoned-sounding, but not too stoned.
Peter and I looked on, delighted, our heads bouncing to the remembered beat.
“You see what you guys can accomplish when you don't spend your whole day wrapped up in some screen?” I asked sapiently.
“Yeah, you were right,” Luke said. “This was a lot better.” He paused. “Hey, Dad,” he added at last. “What's this song all about?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, what's it about? I mean, ‘purple haze all in my brain …’ why? Why is there purple haze all in his brain?”
Still high with the pleasure of their weekend—Hendrix and pool, instead of GameCube and computer!—I said unguardedly, “Oh, it's a drug song. It's an acid song—Purple Haze was a way of referring to acid.”
Peter corrected with a scholarly tilt of his head, “You know, actually, I think that it's a psychedelic song, but not really an acid song. It was a trippy kind of pot, I think. I think they started calling that stuff Purple Haze after the song was well known.”
I nodded: good point. “Anyway,” I said pedantically, “it's about an acid trip. It's an attempt to evoke the inner world of an acid trip.”
The boys looked back at us.
“You mean it's a song about drugs?” Theo asked.
“Yeah, exactly,” I said. “He was, you know, an addict.”
“Is he dead?” Luke asked.
I nodded.
“Well, what did he die of?” asked Luke, always obsessed with questions of mortality.
“Oh, he died of a drug overdose. He's buried in Père-Lachaise,” I added, with a pedantry growing lamer every moment, “you know, the cemetery in Paris.” (He isn't, of course. I had the wrong dead rock star.)
“How old was he?” Luke asked.
“He was, I don't know, twenty-eight or twenty-nine.”
“What kind of drugs did he die of?”
“I'm not sure. I think it was heroin, but a speedball or crystal meth, something like that. Hey, play it again,” I said weakly. “You guys are great.”
“What kind of drug?” Theo repeated, more maturely, evaluating it.
“Speed, I think,” Peter said. EA Sports Madden NFL was looking more creative every moment. Reruns of Gilligan 's Island were looking more creative.
“Why did he die of a drug overdose?” Luke asked, and, in line with my general principle of giving every one of his straight questions a straight answer, I explained what I could about musicians and their demons and their demands.
“See all the fun creative stuff you can do if you're not staring at a screen?” I added, lamely, as a coda. The boys went back to Hendrix.
* * *
I see, of course, the absurdity and comedy and even the hypocrisy of our parental struggle against the screens. The screen addiction is partly hateful because it is an addiction—an enslavement—and partly threatening, to be truthful, because it is not our addiction. Though many of our best memories are of staring at screens in our sometimes aimless and druggy adolescence, the thing we fear most for our kids is that they will end up druggy and mixed-up adolescents, staring at screens. Our screens, we tell ourselves virtuously (and the boys, when they will listen) were the screens of film societies and old television shows, which we now recycle to their bafflement; but the addiction was, in truth, the same, or very like.
Yet though I sense the absurdity, I still think there is an honest core, something worthwhile, at the heart of our struggle. We pull them away from the screens because, as always, we want them to be decentered, just a little. Our job as parents is still first to center our children constantly—to make them believe that they are uniquely valuable suns within a solar system of other people on whom they shine every day, that the light they cast is always welcome, daylight on another planet. But then our job is also continually to de center them—make them understand that theirs is not the first nor only nor most important consciousness in the world, and that half of life involves signaling to others that we recognize this fact, even if we don't quite believe it to be true. They may be suns, but they exist in nebulae and galaxies of billions of other suns. It is the problem of child flight, returning as it always does: We want them aloft, blessed by fairy dust, second star to the right and straight on to morning. And we want them flat-footed and realistic: You're lucky if you get to the corner in one piece, look both ways as you cross the street, do it twice. We want them aloft and alert, and at the same time.
The screens, video games, computer games, and online chat rooms center them very literally, by giving them the role of Gandalf, manager of the Yankees, God. It is perfectly true, as the contraries insist, that video games teach a good deal, that they encourage the kids to improve their pattern recognition, hand-eye coordination, and whatever else. But that's exactly the problem: not that they don't learn anythingthing from the screens but that they learn too much too easily. They earn a certain kind of limited mastery without interference from others. Really mastering something means learning it from someone else. You can't be a master without first having been an apprentice.
So the pleasure Peter and I felt as we watched the boys give up the new screens for the old vices was not, I think, entirely wrongheaded. The strongest decentering force in life is the past. When the children come into contact, however briefly or absurdly, with something that is outside themselves—the first notes of “Are You Experienced” or a pool cue and the hard stare of real pool players—it at least suggests that life is not a universe with the self at the center, but a river running through time, into which you are lucky to dip your hand and come up with minnows or diamonds or old Coke cans, tattered sheet music and cue chalk. A boy with a pool cue in his hand is doing himself some good just by standing in a long invisible line of other boys with pool cues, stretching out the pool hall door into the American past. I suspect that the people of The Music Man's River City, exactly as appalled by their boys in a pool hall as we are by our boys staring at a video game, would have been relieved if their boys ran off to do the Tom Sawyerish things, play pirates in caves.
We don't really want them to practice the eternal virtues. Or rather, we do want them to practice the eternal virtues, but, short of that, we'll settle for the older vices. The older vices are our secret name for the eternal virtues. The older vices at least are old; you have to learn them from your fathers.
Olivia, at four, still plays with words, not screens, much less pool cues and broken chords. Her games are more purely verbal, games of discovery rather than acquisition. She likes to use long words to show her maturity, rather than short ones to show her cool. “Actually” and “obviously” have become her two favorites. “Actually” in a four-year-old's vocabulary means “surprisingly so,” as, surprisingly, does “obviously.” (Everything in a four-year-old's vocabulary means “surprisingly so,” actually, not because everything is so surprising to her but because she wants you to know that she knows how surprising things can be, and therefore how unsurprised she is capable of being at them.)
“Actually, I like everyone in school,” she says, adding, “I like everyone, actually, but I like my mother most of all.” Or “Obviously, all the kids think that way.” She needs some way to “mark” her recognition of a particular class of events—not strictly surprising but “more surprising than you might think.” Much of human communication involves using the most extreme language to mean just “more than you might think” and “more often than you might imagine.” We say “Geography makes destiny!” when we really mean “Geography matte
rs far more than you might think.” When Olivia says, “Actually, I like boys best,” she means “I like them more than you might think I do.”
Olivia and her friends have the normal vocabulary of four- and five-year-olds, with some peculiarities that I think may be purely local stuff. Their other marker word is “miscellaneous,” which Olivia probably picked up from her super-sincere teacher. She uses it accurately enough—“There are some miscellaneous children in the class”—but uses it to mean “generally diffused throughout, unmarked by any distinctive feature.” “Interact” is another word she likes. Having noticed me teasing the kids in her pre-K class (pretending to be unable to tell Sophie from Sylvia), one morning on the way to school, Olivia said to me quietly, “Dad, would you please not interact with the other children?” “The miscellaneous children, you mean?” I asked. She ignored me.
Actually, the four odd vocabulary “items” Olivia uses sum up all the marking you need for a New York life. What distinguishes life here is anonymity and intimacy, the dance of the two; marking out your decisive in-group from the vast indistinguishable and unknowable out-group. “Actually” marks the hard truth beneath appearances; “obviously” marks the consensus of in-group opinion, four-year-old opinion; “miscellaneous” is the great mass of common unmarked experience that surrounds you; and “interact” is what all of these obvious and miscellaneous forces actually do.