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Something to begin with: the mind begins at a rest, a resting point, the still point of the phone. In order to write, we have to launch ourselves from the screen, and thus, away from it. A huge, gravitational field of information threatens to suck the brain into orbit, if it’s not already there. I so often begin my articles not being able to begin; one cannot help but write in a conditional mood of frustration and distraction. Even if you unplug your internet, turn off your phone — the draw is still there, the brain still pulses with desire for the screen. There’s simply no outside, no utopian space where we can go back to 1900 or 1500 cognitively. The thousands of hours of blissful boredom and silence, in which the 19th century reader would have read George Eliot or Tolstoy are simply gone — they are a natural resource that have been wiped off the face of the earth. There are species of silence, and we have lost deep silence: it was not fit for survival.
