Elsewhere

There is always something missing. Is there always something missing?

Yesterday I was lying in a hammock in a beautiful courtyard. It is summer now, but it was a coolish day, and a row of birches stood off to my left, their leaves trembling in a way that almost let me pretend that they were aspens and I was on a mountain in Colorado, though I was in fact in a city—Cambridge, Massachusetts, to be specific. I turned from the birches and the students milling about the courtyard, looked straight up to where the canopies of two huge oak trees swayed, and thought, “This is good. I am at peace.” But only for a second. Because the thought of how peaceful I felt led me to speculate on how I could live in a way that led to more peaceful moments like the one I was—or had been—having, and in a thought’s millisecond that how turned into where and I began to imagine owning a summer home, in Colorado or Cape Cod or even in Cambridge, though wherever it was it would certainly have a hammock where I could rest and have peaceful, thought-free moments like the one I had been having a few seconds back. The way the mind turns (or moves or flits or swims or whatever it does), this thought might have led to a darker one: how I could barely afford a first home (and hadn’t bought one until I was forty-nine), which might have led next to the barren land of financial bitterness. Luckily, this did not happen. Instead, lying in my actual hammock, I considered my theoretical hammock, the one in Colorado or Cape Cod or wherever, and decided that when I finally arrived at that future peaceful place, what would complete the picture would be if I were not just lying in the hammock staring up at trees but spending a whole blissful afternoon reading in the hammock. And so I got up to get my book, worried, of course, that someone else would take the hammock while I was gone.

How long did that whole mental drama take? Twenty seconds? Less than a minute, I’m sure. And how many similar dramas go on each day, each minute, in each of our minds? How much sheer energy is expended on such things? “We humans are an elsewhere,” my former teacher Reg Saner wrote. I have perhaps been guilty of using that quote too much lately, but I do because it gets at an important part of what it means to be alive as a human being, or at least what it means to be alive for me. I do not mean this is the only way our minds work—right now, for instance, my own mind is wholly on board with the absorbing, imaginative act of writing this essay—but I want to suggest that this way of being, the elsewhere way, is underrepresented in our writing. We are rarely content where we are, almost always looking to supplement what we are doing with something else, and yet we refuse to acknowledge it. To do so would be to admit that something is lacking in our lives.

We have lately seen some literally glaring examples of this elsewhere life: walk onto a college campus at night and observe the screen-staring zombies shuffling down the paths. Little beacons of light shine out from their machines, from which they appear to take orders. Or consider the eighteen-year-old son of a friend of mine who was just visiting and who, in the evening, would watch a movie or TV show on his laptop while using his phone to tweet or Facebook or text or whatever with friends, making him doubly or triply elsewhere. But these are easy targets, fish in a barrel. What I am trying to get at is not something that started with the Internet, but with the dawn of mankind. It is something deeper, ingrained in human nature, a chronic condition. If anything we can thank the Internet for revealing this tendency to be elsewhere, for...