on digital vacations

Read all of Dickens!

I had not meant to take a digital vacation. I’m not quite sure I took a digital vacation. Perhaps taking a digital vacation requires intent over accident. Perhaps it’s difficult to convert accident into retrospective intention. Perhaps there’s no way to transubstantiate accident. An imp on my shoulder insists that the very notion of transubstantiation can only be accident. I shall acknowledge—and ignore—that imp.

In a moment of carelessness and excitement, I found myself without any digital access for a few months. It was not a digital holiday because everything that surrounded my life for those moments happened through the digital. I needed the kindness of others to let me know some of what filtered through the digital. There was kindness, for which I am grateful.

The unexpected digital holiday—can the accidental ever be a holiday—severed me from contact with friends and writing. About the friends, I will say nothing.

The writing, though.

I had writing in process when I was digitally disconnected. I was trying to stay with the writing long enough to hear its rhythms. Long enough to let its lines unfold. The digital interruption threw me off. I had to restart what I could, listen for a different kind of melodic line. (I misuse musical metaphors, as I’m never quite sure how to describe the process of writing. Musicians might forgive me.)

Interruption—a method I treasure—took on a different weight and texture. In a different geohistory, the rhythms of time and movement undid my writing practice. The interruptions that ground me in Nairobi—the sound of birds, interactions with neighbours—were absent, as were the ordinary practices of everyday life—cooking, washing dishes, gardening. The ways I cut time in Nairobi were moved by other demands, some welcome. I have yet to understand how the new cuts in time will shape what writing might emerge.

The pope died while I was away. As did Ngugi wa Thiong’o. I keep linking them in my thinking. Both institutions of a type.

(the few things I’ve read about Ngugi since his death have been largely uninteresting—younger writers want to claim intimacies that feel forced; his contemporaries are few, and perhaps caught in their own grief and worried about their own mortality to write anything substantive; the academics who made their careers by claiming to know about him are still trying to do so; and I suspect the people I most want to read about him will need time to sit with their grief before writing might emerge)

A few obvious things: there is no virtue in digital vacations. Like all abstemious practices, they satisfy one’s ego more than anything else. I do not feel that I was deprived of anything. Nor do I feel that I am now a better person because I am responding to emails months later than I should have. I have lost the habit of typing, so I am retraining my fingers. I can only be grateful for muscle memory.

A digital holiday is often framed in terms of absence from social media. Yet, so much of the business of living is tied to the digital. It is how we get news. How we pay to access public spaces in Kenya. How we pay bills. How we grieve together. How we dream freedom. (One giggles at all the YouTube creators who post daily about how they are living “off-grid,” away from all the “hassles” and “toxins” of modern life.)

We are assured that once we are away from the fractured attention created by the digital, we will enter the nirvana of reading 1,200-page novels within a single day!

Read all of Dickens in two weeks!

If that’s your thing, go for it. Charlie wrote some good stuff. Or is it Chuck?

I wrote. By hand. And there was some satisfaction.

Perhaps that’s enough.