This Is Running for Your Life Read Online Free Page A

intimacy is tenable when we are so many and moving so goddamn fast.
    If anything could, recalibrating and redistributing the weight of our shared past might begin to restore a sense of pace to the culture, relieve it from the sleeperhold of easy nostalgias, and reroute the collective longing behind those impulses in some more useful direction. Svetlana Boym says nostalgia outbreaks often follow a revolution, and to the Velvet and the French I suppose we must add the Facebook. Though it seems unfair for a fogyish revival to court its constituents as they move through their thirties, which is to say just as the fog is finally clearing.
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    I was buying gum and uranium-enriched sunscreen not too long ago when the drugstore clerk was swept into a Proustian vortex by the sight of my gold Motorola RAZR on the counter. “Ohhhh,” she sighed, dumping my purchases into a tiny plastic bag. “I know that phone. I wanted one of those so bad .” She beamed at the memory. “That was the phone .” It was a rare moment of gadget relevance for me, so much so that I didn’t notice her use of the past tense and said something shy about how you don’t see many of the gold ones around. My clerk frowned. “Tsssk—not anymore ,” she said. “I’m talkin’ like two years ago . When I was in high school .” I punched in my PIN. “I have a BlackBerry now.” I covered the phone with my palm and slid it off the counter. “You need to upgrade.”
    And I did, believe me. Let’s call it the theory of receptivity 2.0.
    The problem, if you will permit it to be thought a problem, is that I can already feel myself reaching the point my grandmother hit in her eighties. For her it was the airplane, the car, the telephone, the radio, the movies, um, the atom bomb, television, microwaves, space travel, CD, DVD, ADHD—fine. But the cell phone was a gadget too far; my grandma simply topped out. There’s a limit to the assimilating one person can do in a lifetime, and she reached it with fifteen years to go. I was the teenager who complained about being made to whip cream by hand in her kitchen, the congenitally late but ultimately enthusiastic adopter of everything wireless, compressed, ephemeral, convenient, and generally knuckle-sparing about the digital revolution. And yet every other week now, when I hear of something like Google glasses—which I guess are goggles that annotate the visible world with information about what can be bought, eaten, or sexually enjoyed therein—my first thought is a grandmotherly Aaaaand I’m out.
    My knees are still good, my friends! I have perfect eyesight, and you know why? Because I let someone cut into my eyeballs with a laser . I don’t hold biweekly Fight Club vigils in my living room, frost commemorative Tracy Flick cupcakes for friends, or wrap myself around a life-size Ralph Fiennes pillow each night. But the older I get, the more protective I feel of something like 1999, a time that felt interesting even then because it was so firmly allied with the present. The longings I associate with it are longings outside of time, larger than me and the movies both. To experience such a radical burst of cinema in my own time stopped me in my tracks, but hardly permanently. If anything, it kept me seeking that feeling, of being a part of something remarkable, and staying awake enough to know it. If anything, I fear not having it in me to care in that same way about the latest tablet, or to develop strong feelings for what amounts to a delivery system, or to imprint sense memories on a soon-to-be-obsolete aluminum slab. Which is to say I worry less about being left behind than not wanting to board the party bus in the first place.
    In a 1968 conversation with Marshall McLuhan, Norman Mailer used the example of plane travel—the latter word, as McLuhan points out, taken from the French verb to work —to