THE GIFT OF SPACE

The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it “annihilates space.”  It does.  It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given.
— C. S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy

I take issue with the modern world on a very regular basis.  I ought not to.  I am confident that if some magic allowed me to step back two hundred years, I would discover just how I feel about our fancy technology – I expect that I would come to regard it as indispensable.  But it is maddeningly efficient.

As an example, I shall rail against the internet, which I use every day!  I could wish that it would just disappear, but if that wish were fulfilled I would complain – oh, and I can admit that.  I would be upset by its absence, but I also know that we are missing something very important in the age of Google, this age when a search engine can answer most everyday questions swiftly and easily.  It happens more rarely that we must look long and hard for our answers, that we must turn pages in dusty books.  And we do not feel the achievement that comes of working hard and reaching a goal.  Google is not a tool, Google is a cheat.  A cheat which I use daily, mind you.  A cheat with drawbacks as well as advantages.

I am sure that you see my point without any further digressions into matters such as indoor plumbing, telephones and electric mixers.  I’ll be the first to say that I am a hypocrite about such things – I have been known to long for the days when women wore only skirts, and to do so while wearing jeans.  But my hypocrisy is usually accompanied by a good deal of thought and reflection.

I am not one of those wonderful, open-minded people who read the works of writers with whom they do not agree in order to better understand another point of view, and perhaps to consider that perspective.  No, the book I am reading at present was written by C. S. Lewis, a man with whom I agree on a great many points, and with whom I knew that I agreed before I started.  So instead of being enlightened through consideration of new angles, I am finding that Lewis and I agree even more than I was previously aware.  I am having my ego boosted through the confirmation of my own opinions.  It is quite satisfying.

The following passage brought me particular delight.

I number it among my blessings that my father had no car . . . The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given me.  I measured distances by the standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return I possessed “infinite riches” in what would have been to motorists “a little room.”  The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it “annihilates space.”  It does.  It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given.  It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten.  Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter.  Why not creep into his coffin at once?  There is little enough space there.  

Some say of poetry that it “speaks to their soul.”  Lewis’s abuse of modern transport spoke to mine.  There is so much adventure to be had in the idea of distance.  Visiting the coast would bring a sensation of journey, of daring voyage, if not for the airplane that can take me there in half a day.  Growing up, my family went to California twice a year, but the several states that had to be crossed in getting there felt like nothing, because so often we traveled by plane. When I was ten or so, we drove, and the sense of accomplishment upon reaching my grandparents’ house was increased exponentially.  Suddenly we were daring adventurers.  It was inconvenient, of course, but inconvenience makes success its own reward.

To travel on foot creates even more adventure in even less territory.  The Irish countryside was vast and expansive to the young C. S. Lewis, and the fair city of Des Moines is equally as vast when I approach it on foot.  A walk to the library is a great expedition when my shoes are my only vehicle.  There is a freeway not far from our apartment, a direct line to many exciting places which I have yet to discover, but I am quite satisfied to pretend that it isn’t there at all. I do not want my space annihilated: I want to feel the full force of it, and run to meet it.

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Italicized quotations taken from:
Lewis, C. S. Surprised by joy: the shape of my early life. 1st American ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956. Print.