Thinking has always been a tricky business. We overshoot realities because of optimism and ego, fail to consider what’s possible out of pessimism and anxiety.
Those who seem not to think too carefully about the faults of their thinking often succeed where those who perseverate fail. It’s hard to sink a putt or shoot a free throw if you are overthinking it. And most of us overthink everything.
In the past thinking was a lonely act. Artistically and culturally, the best company one could bring to the interior life came from reading.
Books offered a few hundred pages of parallel insularity one could follow as a friend or an interloper or lover. What made the theater, and then movies, exciting were the shared gasps and laughs. Now the readers around you could confirm the jolt of a surprise, the laugh in a joke, the blissful, wishful sigh of a kiss.
There was confirmation too that the people on the stage or the screen had “underthought” it. See The Godfather one and two, but skip three. If there were debates about such claim—criticism and popular opinion—it could at least pretend to up our thinking: “Let me make my case for why Sofia Coppola did not ruin the third movie, as everyone thinks.”
(In Hamlet, the most ironic two words are “Buzz, buzz,” which are made the insult of a young man to an old man about his understanding of news and drama and what matters in our lives and the world. But Shakespeare would have known that people are never so alive as when they “buzz, buzz” just outside the theater after the show. That buzz, buzz is overthinking at its best. Even if we are all buzzing about how bad a show was, how Polonius like Godfather III is, our buzz elevates us. We think we saw something better in a previous film and can see into how what we just saw could have been improved or fell short. Even if it is all what Hamlet calls “grounds more relative than this” it is enervating and uplifting and, despite all the buzz of disagreement, clarifying.
Our digital age puts us all at home thinking too, but not via the interiority of the sacred book, nor in the common and confirming and magical space of the theater. We watch the same images but do so asynchronously. We buzz on our own time and to someone whose experience was not the same as ours because they watched differently, at a different time, on their own device. There may be vague commonality, but there was no togetherness.
The book is ours and, so moved, we carry it with us into the world. Nothing other than love can be so singularly received and offered up.
The theater is a globe we re-make with our post-show buzz—together—in our chatter after the curtain goes down. Nothing save the justice of “we hold these truths to be self-evident” is such a noble group project.
For reasons hard to pin down but also tough to ignore, the internet shatters love and undoes the commonweal.
Or, at least, that’s a charge you might make against it,
I think.