全国英语六级历年真题
Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top
room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, California, pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in
their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high
prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.
Has it really come to this?
The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Internet
rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.
Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to
disable the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel
experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time (no phone or e-mail)
every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. Workers were not allowed to use the
phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think.
The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas
Carr notes in his book The Shallows. The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text
messages a day, though one girl managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a
month.
Since luxury is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow will long for nothing more than
intervals of freedom from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that
leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.
The urgency of slowing down—to find the time and space to think—is nothing new, of course,
and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less
time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that
consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and
yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems
come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than
content, Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots (奔跑), a mile in a
minute does not carry the most important messages.”
Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When
things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.”
We have more and more ways to communicate, but less and less to say. Partly because we are
so busy communicating. And we are rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that
what we need most are lifelines.
So what to do? More and more people I know seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation (沉思),
or tai chi (太极);these aren’t New Age fads (时尚的事物) so much as ways to connect with what
could be called the wisdom of old age. Two friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath (安息日)”
every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning. Other
friends take walks and “forget” their cellphones at home.
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