I saw
an amazing sight Saturday night as the “super perigee moon” rose up out of the
Atlantic Ocean. Moonlight on water is
hypnotic, mesmerizing. It is a window into infinity. A full moon big enough to
reach out and touch, barren and beautifully scarred by impact craters as old as
the solar system reminds us that we are blessed to float suspended in space on
a unique and irreplaceable life raft. The
beauty of the night was enhanced by ocean breezes and waves rolling onto the
shore. It was a magical night.
As my
wife and I walked along the shoreline, drinking in the enchanting sights and
sounds, I witnessed a scene that seemed strangely at odds with the tranquility
of nature and the rich feast for the senses.
A woman driving a new sedan whipped into a beach access parking lot and
jumped out of her car. Motor running, music blasting and headlights glaring,
she proceeded to point her I-Pad at the moon. Poking her glowing slab a few
times with her fingers she was apparently taking snapshots of the scene, but
before we had gone five paces she hopped back into her car and sped off into
the night.
I do
not know what necessity drove this woman. Perhaps she was late for work or late
for a gathering, but chances are that her entire memory of that beach scene
will be compressed into a few pixels stored on a computer. As we walked along the beach that night, I
noticed many more people recording the experience in similar ways, and my wife
and I will undoubtedly be posting our own images of the night on Facebook.
Taking
pictures is certainly not a new phenomenon, but now that every phone is a
computer and every computer is a camera, it seems that we are becoming a people
who experience reality in a radically different way than our ancestors. Long before the camera became ubiquitous,
people shared experience by word of mouth. More recently when we did take
pictures, we had to wait for them to be developed. With great anticipation we
would pick up our photos from the drugstore, and as we looked through them, we
would talk about the experiences behind the images and then carefully preserve
our favorites in a photo album for future reminiscence, future conversation.
A few of us still enjoy the written word. Some
of us still keep old photo albums with captions underneath or written on the
back of the pictures. These are all
second hand experiences, reflections of reality, but they do require some
processing, some effort on our part. A life experience dominated by fleeting images
is bleached flour, missing the nutrients found in the whole grain. Every
passing year brings new technology that further separates us from nature, from
a direct experience of reality. We cannot run, jog or hike without ear buds. We
cannot gather without smartphones. We experience nature from a parking lot,
through a lens, on a pixelated screen.
