I ran to a payphone and called my girlfriend when I saw my first one. I’d read about it in the newspapers, seen the television advertising. For a time, there was nothing else on the air or in print. As a college sophomore, studying to be a newsman, I read four papers every day, and no matter how I strained to keep my focus on the news – the consequences of the wind-down of U.S. forces in Vietnam, the fiscal crisis in New York and the headline on Oct. 30, 1975, that cinched my destiny in papers, “Ford to New York: DROP DEAD” – the ads for it drenched me like tropical rain. But I’d not seen a single one on the street until that day at Ottawa’s Byward Market in 1975.
“A Walkman!” I cried. “I saw one, on this girl. The vacant eyes. Like a zombie. How can we do this? . . . No, I wasn’t flirting with her. That’s just the point, if she wasn’t using the Walkman maybe I would have. But it wasn’t possible not even remotely. Why? Because she wasn’t there. She was absent.”
“So what do you think, L?” my girlfriend said. As close to me as dandruff on the suits of “All the President’s Men.” Her expertise: municipal reform, the merits of New York City’s Board of Estimates.
“I think the very nature of the public life is in revolution. I think, from birth to death, the world will now begin and end with the self. Only what happens within the skin will have any lasting significance. I think, in my worst imaginings, that in the future every person will live in their own hermetically sealed world, cut off from those around them. I think there is no hope for a civil society now that people will be using the Walkman, because the language we have to describe what it will do does not suffice; we do not use the Walkman, the Walkman uses us. I think that I am going to be sick.”
“That was only a figure of speech.”
“ . . .”
Next: Running for Your Life: Week One
“So what do you think, L?” my girlfriend said. As close to me as dandruff on the suits of “All the President’s Men.” Her expertise: municipal reform, the merits of New York City’s Board of Estimates.
“I think the very nature of the public life is in revolution. I think, from birth to death, the world will now begin and end with the self. Only what happens within the skin will have any lasting significance. I think, in my worst imaginings, that in the future every person will live in their own hermetically sealed world, cut off from those around them. I think there is no hope for a civil society now that people will be using the Walkman, because the language we have to describe what it will do does not suffice; we do not use the Walkman, the Walkman uses us. I think that I am going to be sick.”
“. . .”
She listened a little longer, but like an animal in a trap. Free only a moment before and now, Wham!, painfully stuck, imprisoned.
“Cut the crap. You were flirting with her, weren’t you?’
“That was only a figure of speech.”
“I’m sure. You’re a man for a figure, L.”
“ . . .”
*
Eight years later, I took a portable cassette player on what was going to be a yearlong trip to the South Pacific and Oceania. (Yeah, I’m almost 55 all right.) I was running at the time, of course; in Papeete, Tahiti, Auckland, New Zealand, Hobart, Tasmania, Sydney and Melbourne. But not with the cassette player. I wanted music with me, but not while I was on the road. I close my eyes and I can hear the music I took with me that year: Laurie Anderson’s “America,” Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Bruce Cockburn’s “Joy Will Find a Way,” Theodorakis’s “Zorba the Greek,” Bruce Springsteen’s “Greetings from Asbury Park.” But when I revisit my journal, my writings during that time, I take away, the landscape, the people, the jumbled makings of a writer in progress.
I firmly believe that part of what made that trip such a wellspring of inspiration for me as a writer, as a runner, and a reader – remember, my three Rs: Running, Reading and (W)Riting – was that I gave myself over to an experience that was as unfiltered by technology as I could manage. Similarly, I am writing – have always written – first with a typewriter and now on a computer without distractions: No music plays, no Internet. Here, I concur with novelist Jonathan Franzen: “You plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw off the little head of it.” *
In “Clouds,” the comedy by Aristophanes, Socrates is at one point suspended from the stage, staring into the heavens. An acolyte approaches, asks what he is doing. From this height, I am contemplating the sun, Socrates replies. “Why not do it from the ground, if at all?” the acolyte says.
“The earth sucks the thought-juice down,” Socrates says.
To me, headphones suck the thought-juice down. What would be more unthinkable than Socrates in headphones staring into the heavens?
My parents didn’t own much of lasting value, except for the Sklar lake-blue print sofa and our Grundig stereo. The Grundig didn’t get a whale of a workout. There was a Dean Martin album that my mother loved, with the song “Houston” that I’m sure had a lot to do with her visiting Houston once, her only trip deep inside the U.S. (Florida and Myrtle Beach don’t count), a Perry Como, and my first album, “Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player” by Elton John.
When I think of music, I think of the Grundig. Or of tunes like Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish,” a personal reward after a long run in the '80s. I feel the same way about music-listening headphone use as I do about people walking and talking on cellphones, or BlackBerry “thumbers,” or iPhone fanatics. Music is beautiful and transporting but personal and social. It is something to be celebrated, but when it comes to the public sphere, not alone, from ear plugs that speak only to the brain in a way that can’t enhance the outdoor experience and rather too often defines it.
In India, motorists in urban areas take their life in their hands if they drive wearing headphones. Because traffic is so chaotic, hearing, rather than sight, is more essential to staying alive. Usually, in America, the stakes aren’t as high. But motorists, pedestrians and runners alike paying more attention to what’s coming out of their earbuds then what’s around them, can court disaster.
Even at the Pittsburgh Marathon in May, during the first two or so miles of congested running, I found myself dodging around joggers wearing earbuds who were oblivious to the sounds of hundreds of runners around them. You’d think that in a race of this type that athletes wouldn’t be wearing headphones. In the materials for the Steamtown Marathon, for example, the restriction has to be expressly noted, as in, “Runners are respectful asked not to wear iPods, MP3 players or any other devices over their ears.” You’d think it would be self-evident, but there you go.
Dear runner and reader, consider these past blog posts a primer. Next Tuesday, we’ve training notes to discuss, what I learned in Week One of Ten in preparation for the marathon on Oct. 10.
* Time magazine, Aug. 23, 2010
Next: Running for Your Life: Week One
