I see through the window that it has begun to snow. Plump, lazy flakes drift more sideways than down. They appear to be arranged in ranks, with the closest tumbling in slow-motion curlicues. Looking past them a trick of perspective makes the more distant snow fall slower, and further off it’s slower still. At the limit of my vision’s acuity the individual flakes vanish into shifting haze.
All of this plays out before a strip of trees perhaps half a mile away across my neighbor’s land. Higher up the snow is invisibly dissolved in clouds, and the flakes blink out of sight when they drop low enough that the white hayfield becomes their background. Only with the contrasting shading of the woods can the snow be seen as individual pieces instead of a subtly shifting whole. To the right side ash and maple predominate, their gray trunks tinged red by an overlay of the buds that will become new leaves when the weather warms. To the left black-green hemlocks more sharply articulate each flake.
A few qualities of the scene should be noted. First is the overwhelming abundance. While a definite austerity characterizes my winter panorama — whites and grays and muted greens, the earth chilled to a static torpor — it is nevertheless dynamic. I can watch a single flake for a few moments, trace its course, and even, if it’s near enough, get a sense of its particular shape. A desiccated stalk of goldenrod quavers in the breeze. Should I step around to the other side of the glass I would see more clearly still, and I would feel the cold creep around my cuffs, and I would become aware of the peculiar way snow muffles all sound, as if the whole world has put on earmuffs.
Second, the scene is an invitation. I could walk along the fence, turn around, and look back at my house. I would see my bootprints, and like the snowflakes they would be clear at my feet and vaguer as they receded. I could go further, into the dark shade of the hemlocks. From where I sit I can see more distant woods and fields, land I’ve looked at a hundred times before but have never set foot on. Yet I could. I could stand up right now and start walking.
There is a third characteristic I will get to in time, but before that let me introduce another window to the discussion. A cell phone is many: a phone, however vestigial that function has become for most of us, an alarm clock, a calendar, and a device for listening to music, shows, or audiobooks. But most of all it is a window, magically responsive and capable of providing a view unlimited by space and partly unglued from time.
But that’s not quite right, is it? A phone may be, as people are fond of saying, a portable means of accessing the totality of human knowledge, and it can display a video or a picture of anywhere and anything. Yet the viewed object itself consists of no more than a few square inches of light. And while the asynchronous nature of the internet means more than can be imagined waits patiently to be discovered, that discovery (scrolling a feed, tapping a link, watching the next video that autoplays) takes place in that same chair, and is chosen in the place of gazing across a snowclad landscape.
Just what makes a rectangle smaller than a postcard capable of grabbing and holding attention more effectively than acres of land and far off hills rounding up into a pearlescent sky? Why sit, barely lifting a finger, eyes fixed a foot away, instead of standing and taking in the world as it is?
The most obvious and most obviously true reason is that both the hardware and software of our phones have been engineered to keep us engaged. The phone itself is a marvelously intuitive device, designed to respond so seamlessly as to require no thought at all to operate. The algorithms, ever improving, serve up just the right piece of content at the just right moment to keep us looking. Viewed this way it is corporations and mercenary creators who have hijacked our attention while we sit back and let it happen.
As I said, there’s obviously truth to this. But seeing devices as the vehicles by which external agents act on passive consumers misses a critical part of the dynamic, which is that phones are pools of Narcissus. They reflect us. They do offer the new and unexpected, yet their real trick is offering each of us the specific new and unexpected that we want. As our phones shape us, we shape them, or at least we train them to anticipate our fears and hopes and interests even more responsively than they adjust to the swipe of a finger.
Our phones give us frightening piece of news, our favorite celebrity, videos of acquaintances’ vacations, a steady trickle of the cataclysmic and the anodyne that we cannot look away from, because they are what at least a part of us want. If we are not careful we become cocooned in threads of text, sound and image perfectly tensioned to engage our passions, both positive and negative. What we feel to be engaging with the larger world, perhaps the entire world, is actually engaging with ourselves.
Which brings me to my final point about the world outside my window, which is its utter indifference. Nothing out there molds itself to me or my conceptions. If I go on a walk and end up in a drift, I need to slog through or turn around. Falling snowflakes may arrest my attention, but they don’t set out to do so. I have to look to see what I can learn from them.
Chickadees are visiting the feeder that hangs from the eaves. Round chested, with their sharply drawn faces and active flight giving them an air of definite purpose, they keep such busy schedules that they hardly notice me. Between cracking open sunflower seeds, squabbling over whatever things small birds squabble over, and keeping an eye peeled for a marauding sharp-shinned hawk, they only bother to notice me when I step right up to the glass separating us.
I think as I often do of Christian Wiman’s poem (my favorite poem) titled, appropriately enough, From a Window. In it he describes lying in a hospital bed and watching a flock of starlings take flight, “a tree within a tree” that rises “as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.” After their departure he remains in his bed, and the tree remains outside it, yet something has changed.
Of course that old tree stood
exactly as it had and would
(but why should it seem fuller now?)
and though a man’s mind might endow
even a tree with some excess
of life to which a man seems witness,
that life is not the life of men.
And that is where the joy came in.
