Member-only story
My laptop screen promises me that it will close itself; it promises that if I do enough work, if I write, if I answer enough emails, it will dissolve. It is like the devil in this way: it bargains and bargains and bargains. Yet, as much as it promises me that I should write on it — offer my time and my soulfulness to it — the screen — I never uncover the real reasons why: I lose time and produce next to nothing. Imagine if frying pans could talk to us, beg us to fry eggs, and yet the yolks remained liquid and runny and cold. That is what the screen does to us: abuses our good faith.
And yet here I am, typing out this parable on a screen. In order to reach you, Reader, I have to risk contradiction; if I could write to you by hand, by letter, I would, but I don’t know how to reach you.
