on wonder

As a young teenager, I was not athletic or otherwise cool by any metric of the term relevant to that moment. To the extent that I was considered funny, my humor was the defensive, sometimes cruel barbing erected to beat one’s bullies to the punch. I was uneasy in my skin and uneasy in my physical world, but I found respite in the internet.

I forget it now, as a more secure twenty-five-year-old happily anesthetized within the neoliberal mundanity of the smartphone-era web, but the internet used to be a thing of wonder for me. It was the romantic sort of poeticism you find in bookish teenagers. I was less enthralled by the unprecedented technical triumph of this new system than I was by the sublime mystery of the semi-anonymous connections it enabled: the wistful longing that came with entering an AIM chatroom or a Chatroulette talk and sensing an inaccessible profundity of the lives on the other end. Somewhere out across the vast darkness were these people, with their own complex interior worlds, glowing ships in the night passing my own. It was the inaccessibility that made them profound. (The Chatroulette phase was short, for obvious historical reasons.)

I felt this last night playing Journey. I am not an adept gamer, but this did not matter: the game’s value, I’d argue, is in its aesthetic experience; the world it presents is beautiful and meant to be marveled at. But what underscored this experience — what provided its affective heft — was the act of navigating it with an anonymous other. You have no way of knowing who the other player is; your avatars are identical and your means of communication purposely limited. These constraints foreground, rather than undervalue, the fact that there’s another human out there facing a screen, taking a pause from the stuff of his own existence to navigate this spectacular dreamscape. That the revelation of this player’s digital identity comes as the game’s coda is, in my reading, no accident: this is a game about the strange wonder of networks.

I’ll own up to the mawkishness of this meditation, and should emphasize here that I fully understand the limitations of its naivete. When I’m not using the internet to, say, buy some unnecessary thing on Amazon or idly flick through some news story, my overall online experience tends to be more Lord of the Rings than Journey. An hour on Twitter is an hour of avoiding dueling orchestras of bagpipe spammers. I left my job in political journalism in large part because of this: political journalists and their interlocutors seem to almost pathologically revel in this cacophony, and at a certain point I got tired of wondering if people just definitionally suck.

So: I am not a cyberutopian. But nor am I an absolutist. I suppose what I’m trying to say is: Journey is important art. Maybe more important now than it was upon its release six years ago. Naivete, adolescence, and most crucially wonder — I’d like to venture that we do ourselves a disservice by foreclosing the possibility that there can be beauty in these things. As Tom Robbins writes in the epilogue to his Still Life With Woodpecker: “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” Some American art has grappled with this. Terrence Malick’s later films come to mind, and so does Walt Whitman:

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.