I’ve been on a real reading tear as of late, since I got a Kindle around Easter. I’ve knocked out “Confederacy of Dunces,” “Age of Innocence” and Cather’s “My Antonia” in the last few weeks, because when it’s on Project Gutenberg, you can get it for free. I’m all up in your classics, reading them like an elderly librarian who’s finished the gardening.
Anyway, “My Antonia” is about two things: Immigration and Time, which I know is a ringing endorsement for some beach reading (it has a sort of Strawberry Wine N’ Boys of Summer coming of age gloss to it, so not a total bust, however, were you inclined to read it on or near a beach).
But I’d like to circle around on the Time thing. The book’s divvied up into distinct mini-eras of the narrator, Jim Burden’s life in late-nineteenth-century Nebraska; at one point, his grandparents have become too old to work their farm, and they pack up to live in the town.
Jake and Otto served us to the last. They moved us into town, put down the carpets in our new house, made shelves and cupboards for grandmother’s kitchen, and seemed loath to leave us. But at last they went, without warning. [...] Now they got on the westbound train one morning, in their Sunday clothes, with their oilcloth valises—and I never saw them again. Months afterward we got a card from Otto, saying that Jake had been down with mountain fever, but now they were both working in the Yankee Girl Mine, and were doing well. I wrote to them at that address, but my letter was returned to me, ‘Unclaimed.’ After that we never heard from them.
So, that’s not happening today, right?
Now, it hasn’t been happening for like 90 years with more Alexander Graham Bell in our lives, but there’s something very specific to this kind of case that stood out to me. If Jake and Otto, two guys in their 20s, worked out on your family…farm (whatever), you would friend them on Facebook.
It’s rare — and frustrating — when between Google and Facebook, you can’t find any information about someone. Like, you’re the lead actor of your own life (LET’S HOPE), and then around you, there is an ensemble (family, close friends), then supporting characters (friends), then bit characters and extras. The Facebookery increases the presence of those outer realms, and ensures that there’s never true severance with people that exit any realm. You can always find out — that white noise possibility is always there, whether you care or not, especially with people you would never really care to call. Things don’t end, in the most mundane of ways.
That’s a huge change, isn’t it?