I was walking along the sidewalk and saw a woman approaching me. She was glued to her cell phone and wasn’t looking where she was going. Unless I stepped aside we would have bumped into each other. I have a hidden wicked streak, and so I stopped and turned and she collided with my back. I had braced myself for the impact and remained firm, but she was taken aback, dropped her cell phone, realized she had hit someone who couldn’t see her. She muttered a few words of apology while I, in an affable tone, said, “Not to worry, such things happen these days.”
I only hope her cell phone broke when it fell, and I advise anyone in a similar situation to do as I did. Cell phone addicts should be dealt with when they are young, but since a Herod doesn’t turn up every day, it’s better to punish them at least as adults, even if they’ll never understand into what chasm they have fallen, and will carry on regardless.
I’m well aware that dozens of books have been written on the cell phone syndrome and that there’s nothing more to add, but if we think for a moment, it seems inexplicable that the bulk of humanity is made up of people caught in the same frenzy, people who no longer talk face-to-face, no longer look at the countryside, no longer reflect on life and death, and instead talk obsessively, invariably with nothing urgent to say.
We are living in an era in which humanity, for the first time, can fulfill one of the three wishes that magic has been trying to satisfy for centuries. The first is the desire to fly, but by levitating with our body, flapping our arms, not climbing into an aircraft; the second is being able to influence our enemy or the person we love by pronouncing arcane words or pricking a clay figure; the third is communicating at a great distance, passing over oceans and mountain ranges, having a genie or miraculous object that will take us from Frosinone to Pamir, from Innisfree to Timbuktu, from Baghdad to Poughkeepsie, communicating instantly with those who are thousands of miles away. Communicating directly, personally, not as still happens with television, which is dependent on someone else’s will, and where things don’t always happen live.
What is it that has inclined people for centuries toward magical practices? Impatience. Magic promised the chance of short-circuiting from a cause to an effect, with no intermediate steps: utter a magic formula and transform iron into gold, summon angels and get them to send a message. Faith in magic didn’t disappear with the advent of experimental science, since the dream of simultaneity between cause and effect has been transferred to technology. Technology today provides everything immediately ; you press a button on your cell phone and talk to Sydney, whereas science moves cautiously and its prudence doesn’t satisfy us because we want the universal remedy against cancer now, not tomorrow—which leads us to trust the doctor-guru who instantly promises the miraculous potion.
There is a close relationship between technological enthusiasm and magical thought, and it is linked to the religious faith in the lightning action of the miracle. Theological thought spoke, and speaks, to us about mysteries, but used, and still uses, arguments to show that they are conceivable, yet unfathomable. Whereas faith in the miracle shows us the numinous, the sacred, the divine, which appears and operates without delay.
Can there be a link between someone who promises an immediate cure for cancer, Padre Pio, the cell phone, and the queen in “Snow White” ? In a certain sense there is. That’s why the woman on the sidewalk in my story was living in a fairy-tale world, bound by the spell of an ear rather than a magic mirror.
2015