It's 2pm on a chilly Wednesday in November, which could only mean one thing: time for the dreaded Music Appreciation class. "Settle down everyone", admonishes Miss Garmice, and before too long we're into a Baroque era piece by Antonio Vivaldi. Seemingly whisked away to another place and time, Miss Garmice -- her eyes now closed, a smile on her face, and hand movements that hold true to the music -- implores us 5th. graders to appreciate what we're listening to. Never one to step on the music, she would do this -- she sure would -- with animation alone.
That seems like just yesterday and -- but for a universal coarseness that has since encroached -- I could probably convince myself that it was,... just yesterday. But Miss Garmice, who doubled as our second-period English teacher, surely would disapprove of what we have since become, and justifiably so!
CUE the sound of a needle scratching off it's record, here...
Nowadays her lessons on sentence construction take a back seat to chicken scratches fashioned out of # hashtags and phonetic abbreviations. Intimate reading semicircles have been replaced by shallow Google+ circles. And rummaging through library card catalogs have been outsourced to struggle-free searches in a browser. And Miss Garmice certainly wouldn't take kindly to no longer seeing the friendly face of the librarian who lost her job to automation.
Ah, yes... technology. It giveth, but never without taking more. These modern-day oversimplifications are essentially what Schopenhauer warned of in his essays, and had this to say in 'On The Sufferings Of The World':
[ ... Work, worry, labor and trouble, form the lot of almost all men their whole life long. But if all wishes were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how would men occupy their lives? What would they do with their time? If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or ... ]
... or run to Facebook. Yes, the counterfeit experiences that reduction technologies have pampered us with certainly did claim their ransom. They caused us to forget basic things we once had learned and appreciated; or provided shortcuts to never learn and appreciate them in the first place. Because if our flesh and souls could speak, if we would reclaim the voices that our brick & mortar selves once had, they would at once complain to our digitally imprisoned minds, "You've been cut off from the vine!"
I hope Miss Garmice is alive and well and happy; and I hope that the sounds of Vivaldi can still transport her to other worlds, as they once did. I certainly appreciate now, why her class was important.