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Fatal Distraction
Laura Wood writes at The Thinking Housewife:
When people become so distracted they accidentally leave their children alone in cars, the question arises. Is it possible we’ve reached some catastrophic overload? Are we distracting ourselves to death?
We have, Laura says, become a society of workaholics, even kindergartners and stay at home mothers. The only accepted activity is work. No one experiences life.
Laura continues:
[O]ne of the strangest manifestations of this world of “total work” is the lifestyle of the average kindergartner who no longer spends his time playing and singing the ABC’s. He is a draft horse, a budding workaholic, his tiny backpack stuffed with math and reading worksheets. A high school student enrolled in “honors courses” might as well be taken to the central courtyard of the school and flogged or stoned, so overloaded is his schedule with assignments, AP exams and extracurricular feats. Then there is the stay-at-home mother whose schedule is stuffed with volunteer activities for school, church and sports teams. She is arguably more busy, more overworked than the career woman. In many cases, the home has become a scheduling center, not a place to live.
Laura’s description of the hyperactive, back-pack-carrying, loaded-down-with-tasks Kindergartner of today reminds me of the seventh stanza of Wordsworth’s “Intimidations of Immortality”:
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years’ Darling of a pygmy size!
See, where ‘mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses,
With light upon him from his father’s eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride
The little Actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his “humorous stage,”
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.
Wordsworth is not speaking here of workaholism in the contemporary sense in which Laura means it, but of the general process, true in all times, by which the child in growing older loses the traces of the other world with which he entered this world, as discussed in the poem’s fifth stanza:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
- end of initial entry -
Laura Wood writes:
A contemporary version of the poem might be named “Intimations of Drudgery,” and Wordsworth’s line, “See at his feet, some little plan or chart,” would be changed to “See at his feet, some hundred plans or charts.”
The fifth stanza would be changed to:
Purgatory lies about him in his infancy.
Shades of the flourescent-lit office begin to close
Upon the growing boy before he is seven or eight years old.
Laura continues:
I meant to mention in that review of Pieper’s book that his thesis is similar to that of Serafim Rose. Restlessness and nihilism go hand in hand.
LA replies:
Literally one minute ago, just before I received this e-mail, as I was preparing an entry on your Distraction entry with our Wordworth exchange, I thought of adding that this world of constant work fits Rose’s vitalism stage of nihilism. Then I decided against it. I didn’t want to seem to be over-pushing that idea.
Laura replies:
Ha!
But it’s true. They’re saying the same thing.
Here is Laura’s full version of Wordsworth’s seventh stanza:
Behold the Child among his new-born stresses,
A six years’ Darling of a pygmy size!
See, where ‘mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his daycare worker’s kisses,
With gloom upon him from his mother’s boyfriend’s eyes!
See, at his feet, some hundred plans or charts,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by the school district with newly-learnèd art;
A math sheet or a permission slip,
A reading chart or some other mindless assignment;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his cry:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, work, or strife;
But it will not be long
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new terror and dread
The little Actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his “humorous stage,”
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless drudgery.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 19, 2010 01:50 PM | Send
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