By Sara Tocci
It’s officially March, that slapdash combination of mid-day sunshine and five-degree chill, that blooming bluebell with its perennial reminder that nowhere stays dark forever.
I’m walking home from class imagining the birds and the wildflowers singing backup to the Beach Boys song buzzing in my ears. Then the song ends, and Nick Drake starts playing, and it’s all different.
Most people think of moods as filters we put over some objective reality lying just outside our perception. Heidegger disagrees. He argues the mood we’re in is borne out of our experiences, our worlds; it constitutes reality as it is and the future as it will be. Moods come from our bodies, our values, our sense perception: what we see, feel, and, yes, hear.
I walk down the street listening to Nick Drake and feeling the isolation and tenderness and everything that beautiful man brings to mind. I’m passing student after student, occasional old man with well-behaved dog, and they’ve all got AirPods in. A million different worlds on one street. What are they listening to, I wonder? What’s being piped into their ears to complement this blue sky, or drive away any awareness of it at all?
Heidegger would’ve had a lot to say about technology’s proliferation in every facet of life. Two people in the same circumstances holding radically different views on subjects with which they have no firsthand experience, all because of algorithms generated in Silicon Valley to keep them scrolling for more, more, more. I look to my right and left and think about the worlds other people know so well. Our lives are more interconnected than ever before, and yet, I stand right next to them and couldn’t be further away.
Rates of leaving-the-house have been trending downward since the advent of television. I guess when you have a limitless world in the palm of your hand, it seems a little less tempting to go dance around a may pole or whatever people used to do. A downside of this is that people believe in the goodness of strangers less and less. Pummeled with bad news and misinformation, trusting only a handful of close friends, our social fabric is strained with solipsism.
I like for my world to come from the world. I like to feel the kind of one-ness that puts everything into perspective, that distinguishes between things that really matter and the grievances of a twenty-year-old with too much time on her hands. When my world threatens to overwhelm, I think of three Heideggerian truths:
- We are thrown into a world of social, historical, and political situations completely beyond our control. These situations determine the person we’ll become in a future we cannot predict;
- We can only understand ourselves and our world if we understand that the two go hand-in-hand; there is no one without the other;
- The beautiful things that make us feel alive, the terrible tragedies that bring us to our knees, and everything in between only move us because our world is meaningful to us.
I think of this when I’m walking to the library before the city wakes up. I like listening to news podcasts and getting the daily litany of global tragedies delivered to me with pleasant conversational detachment. It’s March, and the sun is starting to rise before I’ve left the house, and the morning birds are drowned out with news of Iran, Palestine, Ukraine. A panoply of suffering and malevolence. I don’t know what it’s doing to my mood but whatever it is I know I’m not the only one.
We don’t all have the luxury to wax philosophical about cultural malaise, or hear about bombings via the BBC. The lived realities in these war-torn countries seem to me surreal, like another world, adjacent to mine but not quite the same. And yet, it is. Raindrops in Durham eventually find their way to Tehran. Every time we vote, every time we choose to protest or keep quiet, we puncture the same social fabric that sends arms to reduce Gaza to rubble.
I think of this world we were all thrown into. I think of its loving, suffocating embrace, how it merges irrevocably with all that we are, how our primordial pre-consciousness and permanent occupation with it is what imparts any meaning at all. I think of every sunny day and teary goodbye, every bus ride, every moment of total devastation, and the day when we wake to find, miraculously, that life goes on.
I tried ditching the AirPods last year, this whole “embracing the world for all that it is” thing, but it was pretty hard to bear months of darkness and freezing rain when I knew I could’ve had the dulcet tones of Joni Mitchell getting me through it all. But now it’s getting warmer, and isn’t it all a little easier? Today I walk in time to the train rushing off, the European wrens, the chatter of voices I’ll never know, with worlds just as wonderfully complicated as mine. Heidegger says we see ourselves for who we really are when we turn away from the noise of worldly concerns. I don’t think so. Maybe, if we all listened to the same sounds, attuned to the world beyond our algorithms, we might see ourselves in one another.
Further reading/listening:
Heidegger, M. (1967) Being and Time. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Blackwell.
Putnam, R.D. (2000) Bowling alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon
and Schuster.The Beach Boys (1971) Surf’s Up.
Featured Image – Sara Tocci