Right now, from where you are sitting, if you want to spin the globe and spy on the beggars in the streets of Mumbai, you can spin the globe and spy on the beggars in the streets of Mumbai. Should there be a lady you’d like to meet in a dark room in Saint Petersburg, that lady will appear to meet you tonight. That old drum-tight circle of life as we know it no longer applies. So fly on a theoretical wing of relativity to stare at that woman teaching you from a classroom in Paris then smash your mind’s reason until you are admiring the bronzed face of a tycoon to whom you’ve been connected - through a friend’s friend’s friend - on his mile wide terrace at the edge of a private beach in Hilton Head.
Touch the keys. Swipe the screen. Tap your finger, and go.
A generation of master minds has labored to bring us the world in just this way. And they have created it all from a lace of mathematical magic and the tiny truth of electrons flaming through an infinite array of atomic eyes. We don’t know how or when they did it. All we know is that they did and living now is no longer what it used to be.
Connect through a billion cameras. Network yourself into a million lives. Stare through an ocean of screens. Be a part of everything while you become a part of nothing at all.
That son of yours in college has linked to a webcam hanging from a streetlamp in Rome. In the morning light of his dorm, he watches Italians walk home from work through the exhaust of evening. A girl with an exotic sway walks toward the lamp and, looking up at the camera, she smiles directly into your boy’s eyes. He melts and out loud he tells the girl that he loves her - then he stops in mid breath when her older lover sneaks in from out of frame and thrills her with the reality of his kiss.
Your aging mother finds herself in the life of some suddenly new friend to whom she and hundreds of others have connected through that flip top box which sits on the kitchen table. This new friend, a woman your mother’s own age, posts videos of her children, her grandchildren, the old man outside her window who picks tomatoes from his garden, the days she spent last summer on a cruise in Alaska. One day this new friend stops posting videos and she no longer respond and your mother begins to grieve. Is she dead? You whisper. Was she was ever really alive?
Tonight, when you finish here, you will Google the earth to look down from space onto the home where you were raised. The porch will sag more than you remember it. And you will try to push the bar on the screen to get a better look. But the more you push and the closer you get to the home you left a quarter century ago, the more you flatten it until it ultimately sinks into the ground and disappears. This is only what you should expect from something that doesn’t really exist in the first place.
So you’ll stumble up away from the planet, fly back into your mind and heart, and you’ll fire up your camera and open up a screen so you can see your sister who lives miles and miles from you. The last living and closet trace you have to your parents who are long, long gone. She arrives and the grey wires of her head jerking and poking this way and that makes you want to cry from longing and loss and the real, living, passage of time . And so you weep, just a little. And when your sister sees it she says I wish I was there to hug you. And then you do it, both of you. You hug the screen.
Today you can see the traffic and the human rage on just about any choked street from anywhere you are anywhere in the world. You can learn Tai Chi from the sweep of a tutor’s hands in a studio ten thousand miles away. Should you be one who needs this sort of thing, you can even connect and share secrets with someone so disconnected from you that neither of you really exist. But that’s the point. You may get something from all this. But it won’t be flesh and blood. It won’t be living as it we have known it to be.
Someday out of a desire for connection you will spin the planet and you will root around until you find a home and descend into a room where you pull up just the right angle to find the only connection that is left to you – the image of another person who has spun the planet and rooted around to find a home and descend into a room where they have pulled up just the right angle to see your face looking back at them looking back at you.
And if you think reality is strange today – that the world is too much too bear and sometimes you can’t seem to believe what is happening all around you – wait until then.
And if you believe there may only be a thin veil between this life and the life of the hereafter, imagine what will happen when what we know of the hereafter becomes just another image on your screen.
Imagine when you are staring into the face of God and he is staring back at you wondering what we have made out of this reality he gave us.
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