Isolation

The "public square" is now inside the mall. The church has a band. Apartments do to us what the name suggests, and houses seem designed to keep relatives from living with us.

It is so easy to use The Net to find out how to fix a broken tool or check symptoms or find the exact quotation, but along with those comes canned entertainment and snares to snatch endless hours from the curious (I'm one of that multitude). There's nothing quite like having the carpenter explain as he shows, but he lives miles away from me, so I make do with impersonal learning.

And so our lives seem to spread farther and farther away. Even the "connection" tools only offer the illusion of friendship, together with even more distractions.

I think T S Eliot was wrong; not so much "with a whimper" as "Oh look, a squirrel!"