Howard Axelrod - The Stars in Our Pockets: Getting Lost and Sometimes Found in the Digital Age

In Memory of Oliver Sacks

If he forced himself to contemplate the constellations night after night and year after year, following their progress, their returns along the curved tracks of the dark vault, he, too, would perhaps gain in the end the notion of a continuing and unchangeable time, separated from the labile and fragmentary time of terrestrial events. But would attention to the celestial revolutions be enough to stamp this imprint on him? Or would not a special inner revolution be necessary, something he could suppose only theoretically, unable to imagine the palpable effects on his emotions and on the rhythms of his mind?

ITALO CALVINO , from Mr. Palomar

A FEW YEARS AFTER COLLEGE GRADUATION , I moved into a house at the dead end of an unmaintained dirt road, deep in the woods of Vermonts northeast kingdom. I had no TV, no cell phone, and no computer. The newspapers piled by the woodstove told of lost dogs, bingo nights, and spaghetti dinners already years gone, and by that first December I needed those cutest darn mutts less as ghostly company than as kindling, their tracks through the snow into newsprint finding purpose again as crumpled balls, then as glowing sea anemones flaring over the previous nights embers. Every two weeks or so, if the road wasnt snowed in, Id make the drive down into the village of Barton to stock up on provisions. There Id catch the dazzle of magazine covers by the produce aisle, the celebrity gossip like a strange mute party that needed your attention to turn the sound back on. But usually I went days without hearing, speaking, or seeing a word, other than the wisdom on my teabagVariety Is the Spice of Life!and the ingredient list on the back of my soup.

If your Luddite alarm is flashing an icon of a misanthrope brandishing a walking stick at technologys evils, I dont blame you. I did grow an absurd beard, and my cousin Mitch announced me at Thanksgiving as the Unabomber. But I wasnt a misanthrope, and my retreat to Vermont, which started in 1999, had nothing to do with technology. It had to do with a question Id been asking myself since being blinded in my right eye five years earliera question that felt both elusive and ubiquitous, so much a part of my life I couldnt avoid it but also couldnt grasp it, a question no ophthalmologist could offer any clues to. What shapes the way I see?

Even that wasnt the right question, not exactly. It had more to do with how the air felt around me as I walked up to class, or stepped down the two wide stairs into the dining hall, with how friends felt closer in space since the accident but conversations felt farther away, with how time felt slower and more fluid, and with how there was some part of me, a deep abiding part I didnt know very well, that felt exactly the same. Really, the question was about how the world entered me and how I entered the world, but I couldnt find the shape of the question, let alone its answer, while being surrounded by it.

The accident happened on a beautiful May afternoon, two weeks before the end of my junior year at Harvard. During a game of pickup basketball, in a scuffle for a loose ball, a boys finger darted into my eye past the knuckle. Time went slow motion, space seemed to collapse, and his fingernail sheared my optic nerve, the cable that connects the back of the eyeball to the brain. Blinded in that eye, I lost peripheral vision, depth perception, and also a kind of firmness in the world, an unquestioning confidence in my sense of reality. After ten days convalescing at home, I returned to school for final exams, but everything looked and felt different. I stumbled often on the stairs, knocked over glasses of grape juice in the dining hall, would turn to my right with a full tray and crash into someone who had materialized out of thin air. Perhaps strangest of all, walls no longer looked solid. I noticed it the afternoon I was studying for my Shakespeare exam. A chair scraped on the floor above me, and when I looked up, I couldnt tell where the brown molding ended and where my ceiling began. There was a kind of hovering, a margin of errorthe ceiling unwilling to commit to a precise location. The wall behind my desk didnt look particularly solid either. Everything in the room had a subtle floating quality, as though Id passed through a fairy-tale portal into a dress rehearsal for reality, as though nothing was really happening in the material world. Instead of going to breakfast, I began to watch the morning from my bedroom window, the patterns of backpacks and jackets shifting like schools of fish. I began to wonder about blind spots, about the tides guiding my friends daily motions, about the tacit assumptions we took to be natural laws. And I began to be afraid that every morning the world would look unfinished to me, every line the ghost of a line, as though what I was seeing had already happened somewhere else.

So, not long after graduation, I moved to the woods of northern Vermont. My hope was that whatever shaped the way I saw would knit together again like so many broken bones. The house had no clocks, and I began to wake with the sun, to know the progress of the seasons by its angle in the sky. The woods around the house expanded; the nearest town drifted far away. On my daily snowshoe treks through the trees, I began to see and hear things Id never seen or heard. The fibers of a maple tree constricting and keening in the cold. A camouflaged black-capped chickadee, its feathers tufting in the wind on a snowy branch. The days slowed. My attention opened, a windless pond taking in the trees on its banks. My memory opened too. I could snowshoe my way back to the house through drifted snow and miles of unmarked trees, ignoring my tracks, simply remembering the crumbling stone walls and the landmarks of birches and spruce. As I unloaded groceries from the village market, the songs that had been playing on the overhead speakers would follow, offering a kind of souvenir map of my market experience. When I lifted a package of ramen from the shopping bag one afternoon, Elton Johns Rocket Man unspooled after it like a thread through the aisles: I miss the earth so much I miss my wife, Id been reaching for the ramen at the end of aisle 3; Its lonely out in space, Id rounded the potato chip display; And I think its going to be a long, long time, till touchdown brings me round again to find..., Id been reaching into the cooler for the orange juice, where Id paused to listen, Im not the man they think I am at home. Oh, no, no, no...

Maybe this happened because of my long daily walks in the woods and my brains new habit of absorbing everything it could as reference points. Maybe it happened because I didnt hear music anywhere outside the market, and Rocket Man is a weirdly memorable song. Either way, everything I encounteredor didnt encounterwas quietly altering my sense of time, my sense of place, and the quality of my attention and memory. What I was experiencing was changing how I was experiencing. Perhaps even stranger, there was no way to feel those changes being made; I could only register they had been made once my ramen became a kind of radio.

There in the kitchen, among foods that were songs and songs that were really a map, it began to dawn on me that the truth about perspective is embedded in the words etymology. It comes from the Latin, perspicere, which doesnt mean to look from but to look through. Perspective isnt a place outside you, a vantage point you can step away from and inspect from afar. Its a lens you cant see because its a part of