This Is Running for Your Life Read Online Free

Teddy Roosevelt) were directed to recalibrate themselves against nature’s rhythms, while women (including Charlotte Perkins Gilman) were put to bed with orders to quiet their minds. Lengthening life spans only seemed to intensify a focus on the primacy of youth, with F. Scott Fitzgerald bewailing a generation’s first wrinkle even while the party staggered on.
    I think you know the rest: We now live on a global clock, every standardized minute counted off on the screens we stare at all day. Our world has never been so closely observed and recorded and mediated, yet our lives have never seemed more self-contained. Western societies are increasingly a matter of discrete single, couple, or family plots, private spaces designed to sustain themselves apart from any conception of a whole. That tendency toward a discretionary existence accounts for the familiarity of the floating, customized Xanadu of the Internet, as well as the hunger for community it seemed to satisfy. The clock was restarted, and the challenge to scale one’s finite sense of time against an ultimate infinity was compounded by a sense of hair-straightening acceleration—the sudden potential to experience all things, all at once. It became possible—it became progress—to live at a speed and spacelessness that held the present in an exploratory suspension. We could prospect this new world like towheads in Narnia, with the sense that life on the outside was paused where we left it, and that “together” we might invent an end to loneliness.
    What nobody told us is that nature may abhor a vacuum, but in its natural state longing is one big sucking sound. Over the last decade, the tightening cycle of nostalgia choking Western culture has proliferated into a kind of fractal loop, and for this we blame each other. But our backward fixations are less a product of the desire to stop the clock or retreat to a more fruitful era than the failure to adjust to a blown-out sense of time. In fact, what we call nostalgia today is too much remembrance of too little. We remember with the totemic shallowness, the emotional stinginess of sentiment. And we experience the present with the same superficial effort. Like overworked busboys gesturally wiping down tables between lunch-rush patrons, we launder the events of the day with the estrangements of irony, the culture’s favored detergent—or dead-earnest ideology, its competing brand—just to get on to the next one.
    On the one hand, perhaps all of the world’s longing has led to this moment. Maybe this is what the poets warned about—Werther and Wordsworth and Whitman, all the wigged-out piners down the ages—maybe it wasn’t precisely petunias and print media and high-speed rail they were worried about but this exact moment . This, of course, has been said before. It’s impossible to know how different our concerns are from those of Hofer’s Swiss soldier sulking on the coast of Sweden, or the Dutch student dreaming of her mother’s toast with hagelslag at Oxford. It’s impossible to know how deeply programmed we are to long for different times, places, tastes—the tinted comforts of memory. It’s impossible to know, in a time that is no time and only time and all times, all the time, how that programming might shake out. But one suspects Broadway revivals might be involved.
    On the other hand are the human things unchanged by time and technology. Things, perhaps, like the cosmic, wall-eating longing that takes light-years to get to you only to confer—burning past your self and any emotion you have known or might know to your very molecules—the unbearable nothingness from which it came. That stuff’s still kicking around. But again, the vessels we fashion to contain and commodify fathomless emotions now often look a lot like Jersey Boys , or jelly shoes, or the memes that streak across the Internet, fostering what little cultural