Oh, Mercy

My October column in BrazosMonthly magazine

C. S. Lewis, the iconic British scholar and author of The Narnia Chronicles (the much loved fantasy classic written for children and the rest of us) and well-known nonfiction books like Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters, once said “I will not be at the mercy of the telephone.”

Well, if Professor Lewis was still alive today he would find it extremely difficult not to be.  Of course, he would be almost a hundred and thirty years old, and at the constant mercy of considerably more difficulties than a telephone.

These days we are all at the mercy of technology.  And, unless you are in the tiny minority of people who still have only a land line, your telephone is, in fact, a computer, right in the palm of your hand. Which in many ways is very convenient, even wonderful.  As a writer I tap on the Google icon continuously to look things up and check spellings and I no longer have to constantly search for and pull down a reference book or thumb through a dictionary. During the several day power and internet outage during Hurricane Beryl my wife Karen and I found our Scrabble boardgame and quickly discovered we no longer own a dictionary. So we had to trust each other about whether the tiles of letters we plopped down were real words or imposters.     

And the navigation system in my phone is admittedly handier than a road map, and usually as dependable.  I confess, though, that I still have a paper map in the glove compartment of our car, much to the vexation of my family (to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, I will not be at the complete mercy of GPS). One of our rummaging young granddaughters once unfolded that map and asked me what it was.  Rather than try to explain, I simply told her it was a historic relic. Like me, it often seems.

I agree that there are definite advantages to having that slender magic box that is part and parcel of our daily existence, but there are also drawbacks. Choose practically any place where people congregate and you’ll see entire families talking into or listening to their individual cellphones and not to each other. And I suspect that taking one away from a child for even a short period as a consequence for some misdeed might be considered, by the child, as cruel and unusual punishment. More importantly, sprawling networks of data bases homestead in there, which is fertile ground for clever hackers to roam around in and extract our identities and our money. 

That aforementioned better part of a week without electricity, WiFi, and phone service drove painfully home just how much we are at those things’ mercy. It made me consider some history for possible enlightenment (pun intended).

My father was born in 1906 and, while electric service and telephones already existed in the world, they did not on the little rural farm where he grew up.  And I doubt his big family sat around bemoaning the fact that they didn’t have them.  A half century later, when I was not yet tall enough to reach our phone, things had improved, but not substantially, at least in our house.  Our telephone was a big ugly black device as heavy as a boat anchor that sat in a high wall niche in a narrow hallway under an attic fan (apparently no one considered having it beside a chair or, God forbid, a bed).  There was no room in that cramped hallway for even a stool, so my parents and older sisters had to stand up and shout into the receiver when that raucous rattling fan was on, which was most of the time. That phone didn’t have a dial.  They had to crank its handle and tell Mrs. Appleton, at her big plug-in switchboard in the front room of her house, who they wanted to be connected with.  Sometimes she’d tell them that whoever they wanted to talk to was in Palestine – a bigger town close by with supermarkets, doctors and a movie theater – and what time they would be home.  Mrs. Appleton was also a community message center.

C. S. Lewis, whose statement launched this diatribe, died on the same day that President John Kennedy was assassinated more than sixty years ago and the world heard much that day about one event and very little about the other. News of Lewis’ demise ended up buried in the back pages of newspapers.  On any other day it would have made headlines on countless front pages and would have been a lead story on nightly broadcasts of Walter Cronkite and Huntley & Brinkley. If those last few words mean nothing to you, either Google them or ask somebody of seasoned vintage who they were.  They’ll know, because back then we had a half hour of national news on television per day, not twenty-four hours.  

Mr. Lewis might not, as he once claimed, have been at the mercy of a telephone.  But he was finally, in his final earthbound act, at the mercy of current events and at what we would come to call mass media.

And – Oh, Mercy! – aren’t we all, every day?