You want one hundred years of solitude? Good luck

Sunday Times Lifestyle

TELFORD VICE, Johannesburg

“The day shit is worth money,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez famously said, “poor people will be born without assholes.” Gabo had a point. So did Garbo, as in Greta, when she famously said: “I want to be left alone.”

Rich and poor alike are born without smartphones, tablets and laptops. Once they acquire them - and they will - they will never again be left alone.

Anyone who acquires a tattoo will never again be naked, but ink squirted under the skin does not call from a noisy bar at 2am and slur for several minutes in a language they refuse to believe you do not understand. Or pelt your phone with multiple SMSs while you are driving. Or send unsolicited e-mail offering their services as a “boss assistant” and attaching a curriculum vitae that specifies breast size - what does “3” mean, anyway? - listing experience as “escort abroad”, and including a selfie of a skinny, smily blonde whose numerically enhanced jugs are almost wearing a strappy top. Funny how aspirant assistant Livia Horopan looks exactly like aspirant assistant Christine Ehrberg, who looks exactly like aspirant assistant Lavana Autoplus ...

Infractions of our privacy are ignorable (I am inordinately proud of the fact that my inbox bulges with 19 718 unread e-mails). But they are ignored less and accepted more, as if everyone everywhere expects everyone else everywhere else to have something to say, text or e-mail to anyone anywhere.

Not so? Hell hath no impotent fury like the self important wankers who take umbrage at their missed calls going unreturned. That this happens because their manners are not good enough to prompt the leaving of a message is beyond them.

There is a vast wealth of privacy and sanity in not being connected as often and as securely as technology allows and society demands. However, anyone who dares to cut the electronic umbilical cord is put in the same category of freak as someone who tries to fit a landline telephone into their pocket and walk out of the door.

Instead of recognising the preciousness of their solitude, the rich pay dearly to squander it on a handful of devices. The poor aspire to be victims of the same unseemly addiction to manic multitasking. Those of us cushioned between those poles of life would not hold down a job if we did not willfully infect ourselves with digital disease.

The major casualty is thought. We are so buffeted by the musings of those who find the time to tweet and bleat and not eat, meet or sleep that we have neither the opportunity nor the headspace to have and develop our own thoughts. Worse, the tweeted thought tends to be stupidity distilled into 140, or fewer, characterless characters.

One hundred years of solitude? Fat chance. All we might steal is a moment, and even then only through the divine intervention of a spent battery or flaccid signal.

When one half of a couple gets up from a restaurant table to go to the toilet, the other half immediately reaches for the damned phone. Wherever two or three teenagers are gathered together in a lift or in a car being driven by one of their parents, two or three brightly lit screens are gathered together, also, and the serpentine sound of fingers slithering over keys slips below the silence.

You want solitude? Do you mean, like, solitaire, dude? Y’know, that lame game the fogies play when they think the boss isn’t looking?

No, we mean solitude - the state of grace reached when we choose to see, hear, smell, touch and talk to the world around us and to hell with what gleams somewhere over the information super-rainbow. Like, in realtime, dude. And in real place. And the resolution is super awesome. Neither buffering nor signal required.

For some, this means learning how to do that most difficult thing: nothing. For others, it centres on aloneness - which is as far removed from loneliness as Gabo is from Garbo. It does not need silence, music or sunshine to thrive. It does need the strength to shut out the connected world. For me, it needs a bicycle to ride or a run to take or a book to read or a meal to cook.

For Jonathan Franzen, it needs a computer that has had its wireless capability snipped and its ethernet port gummed up with glue. That was how Franzen wrote “Freedom”, his 2010 bestseller.

For Henry Miller, “I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.”

You heard the man, Lavana. Now stop mailing him.