Perhaps one of the most relevant characteristics of today’s world is the idea, for some the conviction, that everything is already one click away, that everything is one click away: a purchase, a new friend, an assortment inexhaustible possibilities.
Naturally, all this produces a sensation of immediacy, as if time had been abolished. Before, not long ago, to do something you had to go through a temporary process. Now for “Click-man” it’s all right there on the next screen.
Given that this click is so easy, so desirable, so modern, we can say that, by contrast, for “Clic-man” introspection, listening to the sensation and not to mention thinking become something slow, complicated, outdated we could to say, because all this requires a process, time, effort, concentration, something to which we are getting used to. In addition, clicking is associated with a feeling of power, of omnipotence, with the idea that with one click you can change the world.
Paradoxically we are celebrating, right now, the one hundred year anniversary of the publication (self-publishing to be more exact, because nobody wanted to publish it) of “In Search of Lost Time”, the monumental work in which Marcel Proust, of course An individual from other times, for example, describes to us over 20 pages everything that comes to mind, his sensations, his memories…..when looking through a window!
Curiously, today we call each step of the click, each step of the screen, a window. But frequently, for us today, this step is almost instantaneous, one screen is nothing more than the anticipation of the next, in a concatenation that seems to have no end, which is often an end in itself. Because perhaps we are afraid of thinking that we could be missing something if we do not go to the next screen.
In “Time Regained”, the last volume of “In Search of Lost Time”, Proust writes: “the being that had been reborn in me when, with that shudder of happiness, I heard the noise that was common to the spoon that touches the plate and the hammer that hits the wheel, and when I noticed the unevenness of the paving stones of the Guermantes courtyard and the San Marcos baptistery, that being only feeds on the essence of things, only in them does it find subsistence and in He delights in them. even more of their reality, not conserving of them but what fits with the utilitarian and miserly human purpose that he assigns to them”
Today everything tends to be very fast, but the risk is that it ends up being very superficial.
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