Total Eclipse, The Great Rewiring, and an Exercise
Total Eclipse
Most of us won’t be able to travel to experience today’s total solar eclipse. I will be living vicariously through a friend from Florida who rented an RV and has driven to Texas. For all of us who can’t live the experience firsthand, here’s a link to Annie Dillard’s marvelous essay “Total Eclipse” from her collection Teaching a Stone to Talk. I have been an unabashed Dillard fan from the first time I read her. She is one of those writers who bears up to multiple re-readings. So much to learn from a writer who uses such original and precise language while taking on ideas with so much reach. This essay is one of a kind and certainly is the next best thing to being there. Enjoy!
The Great Rewiring
I heard an interview with Jonathan Haidt two days ago and can’t stop thinking about the consequences outlined in his new book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. I ordered it immediately, as I think he is discussing a cultural shift that has some of the most sweeping repercussions for our collective future imaginable. For most, it’s something of a taboo subject simply because we, the adults in the room, are addicted to the phone in our hand. It pains me to watch people in public, sitting with a loved one or among a group, glued to their phone. I know I am guilty, and while I hope that my mind is still growing by exposure to new books, podcasts, documentaries, interesting people and new ideas, I certainly don’t have a still-forming adolescent brain, one that is still developing essential social skills. Perhaps it is simply because I am a grandparent that this topic is so top-of-mind for me. You’ll no doubt be hearing more from me in this space. Here’s a bit more about the book from the publisher site:
“After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?
In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.”
(All book buy-links I provide are from Bookshop.org. Please support independently owned bookstores, and if you don’t have one in you community, consider using Bookshop.org.)
Monday Writing Exercise: Character Voice
I love eavesdropping experiments for writers. This is a bit of a different take on that, one that’s not so literal. It is directed at playing with the nuances of precise language by trying to capture a very specific speaking style.
Choose a character you are currently obsessed with as a reader or viewer, one who has a rich, individualized speaking style. Whether from an audiobook, that hardback on the nightstand, or a favorite movie, allow yourself the luxury of rereading or rehearing this character’s voice multiple times until it becomes an earworm (I’m currently obsessed with the speaking style of Susie Glass’s character in the tv show The Gentleman). Once you can hear the voice in your head, try to write in the character’s voice such that you are making up original work but work filtered through this narrative or spoken voice.